Search Results for: parenthetical

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/doing-not-thinking).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 178 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, Happy 2015.

**Craig:** Happy 2015, John. We made it to the Back to the Future.

**John:** We made it to that time that was foretold when everything would be just the way it is right now. That movie hit everything exactly right.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. Robert Zemeckis ahead of his time yet again. I think the thing I’m most excited about with 2015 is I will remember that it’s 2015. I think I’m actually going to sign checks properly. For whatever reason, the number sticks in my head properly, because I was signing 2013 for a long time. And I think 2015 I’m good and I’m golden. So, for the next 364 days I am good.

**Craig:** I have a little theory on this.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** And maybe it’s just you and me and none of the people out there, but I find that remembering the odd numbered years is vastly easier than remembering the even ones.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Odd number years — you know, this is going to sound a little weird and it’s going to sound a little idiot savant-ish, but do numbers have certain feelings for you?

**John:** Oh, absolutely Craig. Come on, we’re screenwriters. Everything has feelings.

**Craig:** Right. But so certain numbers feel a certain way and like have a certain vibe in your head.

**John:** Yeah, like fours are blue. Because they’re blue.

**Craig:** And they’re round. Even though a four is not round, it’s round to me. All even numbers are softer than odd numbers. Odd numbers are harder.

**John:** They’re pokey.

**Craig:** They’re pokey. They’re exactly right. They’re pokey. So, even though say four is visually pokier than nine, nine is pokey.

**John:** 100 percent agree with you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s also the number of dots like on a dice or something like that, because the odd ones are always going to have a little bit that sticks out.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this little extra bit. There’s something off. And so they’re easier to grab. You know, when you’re remembering that date, 2015 for me is so easy, it’s such a breeze to be able to write 15. 2016 is going to be annoying because it’s such a round, soft — because we’re in the 20s now. You know, when we were in the 19s, you have all these great dates that were entirely pointy like 1993. Oh!

**John:** Yeah. Lots of pokiness.

**Craig:** So pokey.

**John:** Well, I would say overall since we’ve been in the 2000s I tend — those years tend to slip away more easily. And also the 2000s. So, I’ll often say like 1998 when I mean 2008. And I think it’s because it slips away.

Maybe it’s also the aspect of Velcro. I think that the even numbered years are sort of like the fuzzy size of Velcro. And the odd number years are like the spiky side of Velcro. And spiky side of Velcro, it scratches and it holds on. It’s easier for me.

**Craig:** For me, for sure.

**John:** Also, 2015, it’s a five. And I just remember learning how to count by 5s. And so all the 5s are very natural to me. So, they just feel, I don’t know, it’s like a nickel. It’s a nickel year.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen, I have every reason to expect that it’s going to be a spectacular year because —

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I’m a foolish optimist.

**John:** Yes, sort of positive moviegoing transfers into positive year gazing.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** And 2014 on the whole I would say had some suckage to it. There were some things that were incredibly frustrating and annoying and we also ended 2014 on a really weird down note. So, I’m excited to rebound into this New Year, this new act.

**Craig:** Every year has suckage.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** So, you and I because we are students of logic, fallacies, and cognitive quirks. We know that the human mind is set up to detect patterns when perhaps that does it a disservice. So, you look at trends and over the long run, over the long run the world is getting better. Hard to tell when you’re in the middle of a down spike on your jagged rise up, but overall the world is doing better.

It’s a hard thing to say to people when they’re currently not doing well.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have this problem where sometimes someone will say 2014 was the worst year ever. And I’ll say no it wasn’t. No, no, not at all. I mean, certainly 1232 in the middle of the plague was much, much worse. And then I realize that I’m talking to somebody who, you know, their parent died or they got dumped. Or they lost a job and they don’t need me giving them historical perspective. And this is why I’m not a therapist.

**John:** I would also say though I feel like the acceleration of time based on largely social media but just sort of the nature of media overall, things just move so much faster and there were so many bad things that were all stacked together.

In our episode that we recorded together we talked about the Year in Outrage which was Slate’s little thing where they talked about all sort of the year’s events and moments of outrage. And you just look back on 2014 and there were so many things where like that was crazy that that happened and it’s also crazy that the next week we had forgotten about it. Like Russia shot a plane out of the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** And we just kind of forgot about it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Oh, yeah, that happened.

**Craig:** We gave villains some great news in 2014. And we also gave the unjustly accused great news in 2014. No matter what you do, no matter how bad it is, in two weeks people will be talking about something else.

**John:** 100 percent true.

**Craig:** Two weeks. So, if you are ever humiliated. Let’s say that your email gets hacked and all of it gets out there and you said all these things about people and so on and so forth.

**John:** Like Angelina Jolie.

**Craig:** Everybody’s angry at you. You know what you do? You just go somewhere without Internet and you stay there for two weeks. You come back, and you should be fine. [laughs]

**John:** It’s the two-week cure.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the two-week cure.

**John:** Today on the podcast we are going to be looking at three Three Page Challenges from people who sent in their first three pages of their scripts for us to look at and we will be discussing them on the air. And I think part of the reason I’m so optimistic about 2015 is this — I think we talked about it before we started recording — this was the best batch of these Three Page Challenges we’ve seen maybe ever.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think we’ve ever had one where all three were very good and we have all three are very good. We have three very encouraging Three Page Challenges this week.

**John:** And all three provided interesting things to talk about, too, which is crucial. So, Stuart Friedel, well picked.

**Craig:** Yes. At last.

**John:** The other thing we’re going to be talking about today is Chuck Palahniuk has this great advice for writers about not using thought verbs. And so we’re going to dig into that a little bit, both how it applies to literary writing, but how it applies to screenwriting as well.

So, let’s get into it by first doing some follow up on Sony. The last real episode recorded two weeks ago, the Sony hack had happened. The Interview was not going to be released in theaters, or online, or ever. Everything was in chaos. I wondered aloud whether this was our 9/11. And now, again, two weeks later a lot has changed. So, let’s look through what has changed.

The movie got released. We’re recording this on January 3. The movie has been released. It was released in independent theaters, so not the big chains that were supposed to carry it, but it was released on a fair number of screens. And it was also released online, so on YouTube and later on iTunes. And it earned $15 million online.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, that was a significant change. Another thing that has changed is people have started asking more questions about whether it was really North Korea involved. And the administration has come back and said, no, no, no, it really is North Korea. So, as we’re recording this, the administration is still telling us that it was North Korea who was behind the attack.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s right. Again, this is part of the way news works, and this even applies to people who aren’t normally conspiracy theorists. So, the administration says we have reason to believe it’s North Korea and then a security firm, I believe in this case it was Norse Security says, “Whoa, hold on. We’ve looked at what we can see and from what we can tell there’s no reason to think that it’s North Korea. We think it’s these other people.” Now, at that point I asked a question that a lot of people asked: why not both?

I mean, that’s the way it used to work in the Cold War. You’d pay off some guy working on the inside to get you secrets from Lockheed or whatever. But this got passed around as, hey, Obama liar, [laughs], you know. So, either — it’s dependent on which way your bent was, either it was Obama was a liar, or America is weak and we’re stupid, whatever spin you wanted to put on it.

But point being, yeah, it wasn’t the North Koreans at all. Blah. And look at that, we shut down North Korea’s Internet over nothing. Well, we may not have shut down their Internet actually.

**John:** Yeah. Again, we don’t know what we don’t know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the thing. We have no idea what the administration really knows. If there’s other information about sort of why they believe it’s North Korea. We don’t know if we shut down their Internet. And so we just stumble around in the darkness and point fingers at each other.

**Craig:** Well, this is the new era. We stumble around in the darkness. We don’t point fingers at each other. We throw headlines at each other.

**John:** That’s true. That’s what we do.

**Craig:** We just walk around whipping headlines into each other’s faces while the truth just sits there doing what the truth is, which is remaining immutable and finite. And some people got a little feisty with me on Twitter. “You’re stupid for believing in the government.” Well, it’s just yesterday or today the federal government came out and said, “No, no, no, we’ve read all of your adorable articles, Norse Security. Yeah, we’ve been actually following some stuff for years that we think this connected up with. We have excellent evidence that we are standing by. That this, in fact, was backed by the North Koreans.”

And once again I have to say just because you don’t have the evidence doesn’t mean the evidence doesn’t exist, particularly when you’re talking about something that is protected by national security interests, whether you like that sort of thing or not. So, so far I’m going with North Koreans until I see convincing reason that essentially the government is flat out lying to me.

**John:** I will actually take a contrarian view and I don’t think it was largely the North Koreans. I think they could have been involved to some capacity. They may have hired some folks to do some stuff. But I think this — I think it will ultimately come out that it was not nearly as much of the North Koreans as is now being reported. That doesn’t mean that I believe that there’s a vast conspiracy to hide the truth from us. I just think that we don’t know what they don’t know.

It’s one of those things where I think there are levels of uncertainty here that may never actually fully be resolved.

**Craig:** Well, if the North Koreans paid off some people to do this, wouldn’t that — because that would count for me.

**John:** Would that count?

**Craig:** Yeah, that would count for me, for sure. Oh yeah, absolutely.

**John:** To me, I think the more interesting looking forward from all this is that it did, I think, initiate the era or the public awareness so that we’re in an era of hackers being able to do major things to shut down individual corporations or sort of whole areas of business.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think that is really the more terrifying thing to come out of this. Because one of the things that I thought was underreported was it wasn’t just like they published a bunch of embarrassing Sony emails. It’s that they actually shutdown Sony largely. They shut down all their computer networks.

I have friends who work there who they had to write checks manually. They couldn’t trust any of their own computers. And if you’re in an era now where you can’t do anything on a computer, you’re really screwed. And so whatever the next industry or the next corporation that gets hit by this kind of attack, it’s going to be really interesting, whether it’s geopolitical or just actually sort of the Die Hard model where it sort of seems like they’re terrorists, but nope, they’re actually just out for some money. They’re just going to try to extort you. That’s going to be really fascinating and scary.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff that went on at Sony was self-inflicted by necessity. Once they knew that their network had been breached there were just huge areas of it they couldn’t trust, so they had to turn it off.

I remember driving over to Sony to see Lindsay and it was, I think, on day three of this thing, and I pull up to the security gate and I give them my thing, “Well who are you going to see?” And I tell her and she goes, “Okay.” They can’t — and I realized, oh, they don’t have, they don’t know who — I’m just me holding up a license that says me saying I’m here to see somebody. And they —

**John:** They can’t scan anything.

**Craig:** They can’t scan. They have no computer to tell them yeah that’s true, so just go on.

**John:** And the poor guard. He had to go out and manually lift the gate up because the little computer that lifts the gate couldn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The iPod controlled lift gate. So, they had to — you’re absolutely right. This will ideally serve as some kind of inoculation and hopefully every major industry and certainly every major industry in our town is going bananas on security.

**John:** The pro side is that hopefully some of the firms will become more serious about security. The flip side of that is that if you are an individual or a group who has an agenda, you see like, oh, look what we can do if we put our minds to it. And that’s a troubling thing, too.

**Craig:** Well, yes, but in the end — and this is a lesson that it seems terrorists learn very slowly — in the end what you basically get is publicity. But publicity isn’t an ends to anything. It’s simply a means to an end. In the end the movie came out, it made some money, Sony will continue to march on. Their computers will turn back on. People will stop talking about this. It did not bring down the great capitalist empire, nor did it improve life anywhere else in the world.

It did nothing.

**John:** If it was North Korea and their aim was to embarrass Sony and to make people remember that North Korea still exists, it did that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Briefly.

**John:** Briefly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, again, two-week rule. It’ll pass away. Russia shot down a plane and we don’t talk about that anymore.

**Craig:** It’s already — the second — that’s all you have to do. If you’re one of these people that suddenly is the piñata on Twitter and in the news, what you do is watch the news, okay. Just watch the news. And it’s going to be awful because it’s going to be all about you and it’s going to be horrendous. Just…wait…because sooner or later a plane is going to go missing. You’re done.

Go outside, have lunch. Have lunch. Go see your friends. Everything is going to be fine.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about the release of The Interview as well. So, they followed your advice largely. They did release the movie online.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They released it through YouTube and eventually through iTunes. Did you watch it, Craig?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Craig watches nothing.

**Craig:** I’ve got screeners. I’m going my way through screeners.

**John:** All right. So, I watched it on YouTube and the experience was actually fine and it looked pretty good on a crappy hotel connection on a laptop and it looked just fine. You watch the movie and you’re like, really? We did all this for this movie? It wasn’t my favorite of the Seth Rogan directed movies. But it wasn’t, I don’t know.

It was amazing that all of this drama happened over what you, I think, were criticizing Obama for saying it’s a silly comedy.

**Craig:** Clooney. Clooney said that.

**John:** Oh, Clooney said it. Clooney was absolutely right. It is a silly comedy that had no sort of greater point.

**Craig:** I think the word that he used was dumb which I thought was — I was just presuming that he hadn’t seen it, but even if he had —

**John:** If he had seen it, I think he would have said dumb was correct.

**Craig:** It was a, you know, why editorialize. But the truth is some comedies are supposed to be dumb.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if the world had kept — if this had happened around the release of Caddyshack I think people would have been like, wait, wait, this happened because —

**John:** Caddyshack is a great movie. Come on.

**Craig:** Of course it is. But at the time I’m saying, if you had never seen Caddyshack before and then it was like —

**John:** I predict that 20 years from now we will not be talking about The Interview in the same reverential tones we talk about Caddyshack.

**Craig:** I suspect you’re right. But, regardless, I feel bad. No movie deserves that kind of — no movie deserves that kind of —

**John:** Those guys are wonderful. And so I felt so frustrated for them as I articulated two weeks ago with their movie being held hostage and their work being unseen. So, I was very happy for them that they got the movie out in the world. That people got to enjoy the movie. And I want to talk a little bit about the $15 million, because everyone is like, oh my gosh, we should just release movies online if we make $15 million.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s like, yeah, no other movie will ever have two weeks of national publicity and all the stuff only to get $15 million. That’s…no.

**Craig:** Why are people — ?

**John:** I think it shows how important theatrical is.

**Craig:** You know what? Here’s a resolution for 2015 for everyone. Stop being stupid.

**John:** That’s a good thing.

**Craig:** You know, just stop being stupid. That’s the dumbest. If you say, “Oh, you see that? They made $15 million. Every movie should…” then you need to stop. You need to sit down. You need to admit that you’ve been stupid. You need to admit that you’ve been saying things without really thinking about them. You need to make a resolution. No more being stupid. That’s dumb.

Of course the $15 million is not indicative of anything other than what happens when your movie is the topic of global speculation for two months, or rather two weeks, and also is not available anywhere else unless you live in Austin or something.

**John:** It’s that classic thing of sort of enshrining the outlier as being the new paradigm. And so it’s like saying, “Look at Titanic. Titanic was so successful. It’s super long. It’s a period piece. And that’s what we should be making.” It’s like, no, you should never try to make Titanic again. That was completely an outlier. And you should never try to do what The Interviewer did because, lord, that’s not going to happen the same way twice.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** You wouldn’t want it to happen the same way twice.

**Craig:** No. In fact, I have to admit the $15 million number to me was a little disappointing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because I thought, well, okay, that’s almost the maximum that you could expect from a normal movie that has no preexisting interest beyond the scandal. Like if you went ahead and said, “We’re making Harry Potter 8 and we’re putting it online,” or Harry Potter 9 I guess you would say, “and we’re putting it online,” then —

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’d see a lot of money. But for a little comedy that has all this stuff going behind it, that’s like, okay, that’s an average $40 million movie with all this interest, no theatrical release, now it’s online. It’s only $6, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they made $15 million. Not great, you know. Not great. If anything, I think it showed how limited that venue is for an initial release. That that venue — online — really is a good ancillary market. And, hey, good news for the exhibitors who I have been slapping around a little bit lately. People still want to go see movies in movie theaters. And thank god.

**John:** Yeah. I like movies in movie theaters.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** So, let’s segue to Chuck Palahniuk had this great little blog post article on Lit Reactor where he urged writers in 2015 to take a six-month hiatus on using thought verbs. And by thought verbs he was talking about “thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers, imagines, desires, and a hundred others you love to use. The list should also include loves and hates.” Craig, what did you think of this?

**Craig:** Yeah. Spot on. He’s expanded his list beyond what you call the linking verbs, those verbs that can take adjectives. Like if you ever hear somebody say, “I feel badly about that,” then you can feel free to correct them and tell them that that means that their fingers are numb. They feel bad.

But his point here in expanding this group is spot on. What he’s really saying is these words essentially are stealing your ability to paint the picture or reveal the information in a narratively interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, go ahead.

**John:** Well, Palahniuk is coming from a point of fiction. And so the stuff he’s writing is words you’re reading on a page, so you’re reading short stories, you’re reading a novel, and his argument is that if you say “Tom thought back to his childhood and how much he loved his mother.” That’s a sentence anyway, but by saying that he’s thinking back, by saying that he loves his mother you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to actually visualize those moments, to make those moments physical and real, and to give the characters something to do and something to explore.

Instead, you’re just short-cutting right past them and you’re not actually seeing it. It’s like you’re taking a jet from one coast to the other coast and not taking the cross country trip and really exploring what’s in there.

So, he gives some good examples of ways to show one character’s interest in another character by just really physicalizing the moment. And sort of like there’s a scene at a locker where he does a really good job articulating the moment by moment of like what it is like for those two characters to be in each other’s space. That’s writing.

And I thought it was a really smart approach, especially for talking about literary fiction and prose fiction and the kinds of words you’re choosing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this thing that bad writers will do, or let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, they’re early writers or new writers. They will have their writing describe people, describe characters or moments in a way that the reader or movie viewer would describe them after words. For instance, oh, he hated her. Well, he wasn’t happy to be there. He didn’t like that. He was scared. That’s all how they would describe what they’ve seen or heard. But that’s not what you give them. That’s like basically cooking a lovely meal and then blending it and mixing it with digestive juices and then feeding it to people like they’re bugs. You know, you have to make them work to get that.

Have them open it up. Have them unpack it. Have them draw the conclusion. You want your character to know that this one hates that one because they figured it out, not because one of them says I hate her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And even in screenwriting where the audience will never be exposed to our non-dialogue work, at least not directly textually, it’s another way for us to avoid that syndrome of writing things that cannot be shot.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, he says here, “Don’t tell your reader Lisa hated Tom.” Well, similarly, when you’re a screenwriter don’t write the paragraph, “Lisa sees Tom coming across the street. She hates him.” No.

**John:** No. Because here is what you need to think about with scene description is that when you’re writing a screenplay ultimately you’re writing dialogue that characters can say which is lovely and that’s a thing that characters can do, but you’re trying to give the actors something they can actually play. And hating is not a thing you can actually play.

Actors can only play actions that they can do something. And so you need to give the actor something they can do.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to literally map out every little beat of every little thing that they’re doing, every little twiddle of their fingers, but you need to give them playable moments and you need to give the director playable moments so that she can, you know, figure out what to aim the camera at to explain what it is that’s going on in these character’s heads.

So, what Palahniuk is trying to do here is really what screenwriters sort of innately have to do which is that, you know, as screenwriters we’re only allowed to write about the things you can see and you can hear. Everything has to be externalized anyway. He’s urging prose writers to externalize those same kinds of things that screenwriters innately have to do.

**Craig:** And interestingly a lot of the verbs that he’s singling out here correctly aren’t really things that we do either as human beings naturally. So, we’ll say words like understand. You don’t actually understand something. What you do is you put things together, you make connections. You have a moment. There’s a thing. Eventually you’ll come to say I understand this. You know, believing in something is the summation of a long process. Wanting something, loving something. This whole idea, I mean, love is the best of these words, because what do you walk up to something, oh yeah it happened, I love it. I love it.

No. No. So, Beth can’t hate Don. Beth can have a reaction to Don. Beth can see Don do something. Beth can do something in return. We should watch these people doing human things and thinking human things of the moment the way that we do of the moment and draw our own conclusion from it. So, when you use these kinds of words or when you think in this way, you are doing the audience’s work for them and therefore they are bored.

**John:** Yeah. So, the one exception I want to propose for this moratorium on these verbs is there are moments in screenwriting where these words can be incredibly useful and helpful. And so the thing that comes to mind is in the parenthetical. And so in a parenthetical I can imagine a block of dialogue where the character starts speaking and then has this moment of realization where they actually finally understand what it is that the character is saying.

So, in a parenthetical (finally understanding) or (considering) or sometimes you need like that simple word that sort of explains what it is that is actually going on in their mental process to make that line of dialogue make sense.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That feels like a good case to make an exception for these verbs, because sometimes you really do need to state the internal process for this character so that the line of dialogue makes sense.

**Craig:** What you’re talking about, and I completely agree, is the use of these words as a reward at the end of a process.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A character, if you’ve done your work, and the character then finally has that moment, that epiphany, than you’ve earned it. And then the audience will have it with them and that’s a wonderful thing. You know, at the Christopher McQuarrie screenplay for The Usual Suspects you get to that point where the detective realizes who Keyser Soze is and they give you that. And so, okay, earned. Here’s your reward. Right?

On the script I’m writing now, on the last page it says, “Because she loves him.” And that’s not in dialogue, that’s just in action. “Because she loves him.” And that has never been stated before in the movie. It’s just something that if you hadn’t figured out by then, [laughs], you know. And, in fact, it’s not there to reveal anything. It’s there to reward us all for kind of having followed through. It’s a summation.

**John:** Exactly. So, you know, clarity and conciseness are things you can get out of these words, but only when they’re used really judiciously and really to sort of articulate an internal process that is at the end of a longer thing.

If you try to write “because she loves him” on page ten.

**Craig:** Blah.

**John:** Nah. Like we don’t have enough information about the character to really appreciate what loves means in that context.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. Let’s talk about these three pages. These nine pages, because there are three Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** It’s really 12 pages because they all have cover pages. Good for them.

**John:** Good for them with your cover pages. So, if you are new to the podcast and this is the first time you’ve heard of Three Page Challenge, here’s what happens. We invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their pilot or three pages of writing that are in a screenplay like fashion.

If you would like to read these pages with us while we’re going through this, or if you want to pause the podcast and download these PDFs, we encourage that because then you’ll see exactly what it is we’re talking about because we may get really detailed stuff on the page.

So, the place where you can find this is at the show notes for this episode. Just go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and look for this episode and you’ll see the PDFs for these three samples.

So, the first one, should we start with The Grey Stallion?

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s do The Grey Stallion.

**John:** I can summarize this for us because I picked the easiest one by far.

**Craig:** Please. Do it.

**John:** The Grey Stallion, Grey with an E, Stallion, is written by Mike Litzenberg and Bridge Stuart. We start in a coffee shop. The whole scene is in a coffee shop, so it’s very easy.

We meet Clarence who is 20s, white hipster, nerdy, more than a hint of Tobey Maguire. He’s at a table at a patio. Across from him sits a second white guy in his 20s, Lawrence. He’s sort of a TJ Miller in Silicon Valley type.

Lawrence is drinking his tea. He complains that his oolong tea tastes like crap. Lawrence talks more and more about his tea. Clarence says, “What are we doing?” Clarence seems to be having sort of an existential crisis and the dialogue between them is just — it’s one scene of dialogue between them. Clarence talking about the Mighty Ducks and how he always felt like from the Mighty Ducks he felt like his team was destined to win, and then when he didn’t that was disappointing.

Lawrence decides he’s going to start a dance troupe, an experimental dance troupe and invites Clarence to join his experimental dance troupe. And those are our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, well summarized. Now, normally — the normal flow of these things is that we’ll say something nice and then we’ll get into the meat of what’s all screwed up. But I’m going to do that backwards. I have a feeling I’m going to do that backwards three times today, because there’s more that’s right here than wrong. So, Mike and Bridge, good job. I want to start with what I thought were some mistakes, and then I’m going to talk about what I thought was really, really good.

And the mistakes are fairly small. While the fact that you called out Lawrence as TJ Miller from Silicon Valley certainly helped me immediately visualize him, it also made me realize that you were copying his voice from that show. And in doing so this felt less original than it should be. In general, I don’t like the screenplay to tell me who the actor is. I have no problem with you knowing who the actor is, but I don’t like you telling me, particularly when you’re describing even how they look on another show.

It’s certainly a mistake to cite a particular actor and then cite them in the context of a particular show.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because that’s not how it works. They have him, see? And the last thing people want — and the last thing, by the way, any actor wants is to be told, “Oh, just do what you do in that other show, but do it for this.” This is not an episode of Silicon Valley, therefore that’s illegal. So, that’s a big no-no to me. The other thing I thought could be better — it’s a small thing — but what I wanted was a little bit of external context for Clarence’s problem.

They’re sitting there at this coffee shop and Lawrence is doing what he normally does. We get the sense that he’s just a creature. This is the way he is. And Clarence is more of a worry wart who suddenly has this crisis. If it were as simple as they had a laptop in front of them and they’re working on something. And Clarence — they’re supposed to be working on it but they’re not, because Lawrence is blah-blah-blahing about his tea and Clarence is finally giving up.

I needed a little something just so it wasn’t so dead. Just so it wasn’t just a guy sitting there and suddenly out of nowhere, because the screenplay tells him, you know, the tiniest little bit of context.

But let me now — that was it. Here’s what I loved. First of all, look at the pages. Everybody at home, look at the way the pages look. So, this is entirely dialogue, right? The scene is two people sitting at a table talking. Look how the pages look.

**John:** Yeah. Especially page two. I think that’s the winner.

**Craig:** Yes. You see, the dialogue is broken up by lines of action. There is white space on the page. At no point do any of the descriptions go past three lines, right, two lines or one line typically, which I love, okay? So, all that stuff, that’s the way the flow should work.

The dialogue was basically funny. I mean, I was a little put off by the fact that they are copying what they do on Silicon Valley with Lawrence, but I thought Clarence was saying interesting things. And I liked the way that they used timing. Comedy, everybody knows comedy is all about timing, and yet how do you —

**John:** Timing.

**Craig:** Timing. [laughs] How do you do timing on the page? So, look on page three. Even though they didn’t put in parenthesis a lot of overwriting about how this should go, I know how this should go. Lawrence says, “Not so much a dance troupe. Well, maybe a dance troupe. A neo-feminist-core multimedia industrial rap-collision core performance group. I mean I know that’s…a lot of words. I don’t think it’s going to be ground breaking so much as ground healing.

“Are you in?”

Now. That long pause there was not delineated by beat, it just was “Lawrence looks at Clarence meaningfully.” And having one character look at another one is sort of essential to comedic timing. So, I really like that and I think my favorite thing of all about these three pages is without telling us ever in dialogue or in action or in character description, I know that Lawrence is the alpha dog and Clarence is the beta dog. And that is something I was able to conclude from this scene, meaning this scene was working on more than one level. And I really like that.

**John:** Yeah. I really like these pages as well. And so I want to talk — let me start off with the TJ Miller thing, because I highlighted that as well in my pages. Let me read his whole description and you’ll see why TJ Miller needs to go away there. “A second white guy in his 20s – hipster, curly hair, big swagger, TJ Miller in Silicon Valley – sits across from him.” So, let’s just take out the TJ Miller in Silicon Valley and just what the description is. “A second white guy in his 20s – hipster, curly hair, big swagger, sits across from him.” Great. I got that without that.

And I may picture TJ Miller, but at least I’m not locked only into TJ Miller. And I think big swagger is a great way to describe him. And I think I got it from there, so you could even get rid of the curly hair. Give us something else. Like, describe his chunky bracelet. Describe something else about him that sort of lets us know who he is, but don’t say TJ Miller. The same with the first guy, “More than a hint of Tobey Maguire.” Yes, but you know what, let’s find some other way to do it, because the challenge is let’s say you want to actually shoot these things. Suddenly actors have to come in and have to be Tobey Maguire.

And it’s like, well, I don’t want to be Tobey Maguire. Or they see themselves like I’m not a Tobey Maguire type. How can I do that?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sorry, sir. That was only a hint of Tobey Maguire. We were looking for more than a hint.

**John:** Back off the Tobey Maguire.

So, I want to talk about what these pages actually are, because I’m not sure that they’re going to be the best way to start a movie perhaps, but I think they’re a great way to start looking at how two characters react and relate to each other. So often I encourage people to just start writing. Just start writing the characters having a conversation. And this feels like just two characters having a conversation. And I think if you were to write these pages you would suddenly like know the voice of these two characters. So, I believe that these writers can write these guys doing almost anything. And they could be doing stuff that actually involved a plot.

Because I’m not sure reading these three pages that it’s really going to involve this dance troupe thing happening.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it’s just like two guys shooting the shit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s fine for what this is, but that may not really be the start of your movie, but these guys can write these characters talking and that’s amazing and useful. And so if I read these pages I would keep reading because I really enjoy their voices and that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s some nice moments in here, too, where I always love the idea of writing harmoniously where things are happening in parallel. While Lawrence is talking in the beginning on page one, Clarence isn’t saying anything. He’s not saying anything. And finally he says, “What are you doing? What are we doing?”

And Lawrence says, “I don’t know. I’m just getting my tea on.”

And then Clarence says, “Are we moving forward here…”

And Lawrence says, “Oh god. Here we go.”

That’s a great way to imply more than just I’m not happy with what you’re saying. It also implies this is not the first time we are stuck. You like characters that are stuck in the beginning. We’ve talked about this before. The character that’s in the rut. And it helps — things like that are great ways to get across information, especially when you’re in the beginning.

A lot of people would say, “Look, we’ve known each other for 20 years. And for 20 years you’ve been…”

And I’m like, “Oh, god, no. Please no.”

**John:** Unnecessary. We know that these characters — this, again, tells us that these characters have had this conversation before. They have a history. It’s not their first time sitting down in this coffee shop.

**Craig:** You know what else it tells us? It tells us that Clarence has lost before. [laughs] He’s lost the argument before, which I love. Because he’s about to lose it again. And that’s really good. That’s the kind of conflict that’s always fun in the heart of a comedy.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the specificity of the environment, because I felt it was a little generic around it. So, we start, “EXT. COFFEE SHOP — DAY.” Two people are sitting at a table. And then we don’t really get anything more about the coffee shop. So, I didn’t know where this was taking place. I didn’t know sort of what the vibe of this place was.

Is it crucial? Maybe not, but I think it could be very useful. The other thing I would like to propose, and again, not a must but a possibility is right now the scene starts, we talk about Clarence who doesn’t do anything for quite a long time. And you have the opportunity, you could just start on Lawrence who is actually going to have the first lines. He could talk through some of his first stuff. And then we reveal Clarence, the person he is talking to, who is not paying any attention to him. And is either staring at his coffee or staring around. And that might be an opportunity to paint who else is in this place.

And so then we’re on Clarence, our newer character, and we’re on him right before he says his first line and that could be very useful.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, that’s sort of what I was going for with the idea that there would be some sort of circumstantial context. Because if you want to open on Clarence, if Clarence is trying to write. They’re doing that thing where they’re sharing a laptop between them and he’s the only one writing. And while he’s writing this other idiot is just blahing about his stupid tea and his, you know, fey description of it, and all the rest of it.

And finally Clarence just gives up and slams the laptop down. “What are you doing?” You know? You need that. If you’re going to open with Clarence you need to have Clarence doing something other than just sitting there dumbly.

**John:** Yup. On page two, another small issue I had here, Clarence asks, “So, we could just sit here doing this? Oh god, here we go again. But seriously.” The but felt unnecessary to me. The but was not in response to something. “So seriously.” Get rid of the but.

On page three, a lot of words, “I don’t think it’s going to be ground breaking as much as ground healing,” the missing hyphens there I think hurt the joke. And so putting ground-breaking and ground-healing, it’s a good joke. I think the hyphen would have helped us understand the joke a little bit better. I had to read it twice to actually understand that it was a double structure kind of joke there.

Finally, “Lawrence looks at Clarence meaningfully. Are you in?”

Clarence says, “That’s cool. But I’m not really a dancer.” His “that’s cool” didn’t feel like a possible answer for “Are you in?”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, just small observations.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Just making sure that it really feels like the characters are talking to each other and that they’re saying things they would actually say in the moment and not necessarily their own next line.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. But overall…

**John:** Overall great. I really enjoyed it. And I’d be excited to see these two characters do something in a movie.

**Craig:** So would I.

**John:** Hooray. Next up.

**Craig:** What do you want to do next?

**John:** The Devil’s Eye.

**Craig:** Devil’s Eye.

Devil’s Eye. Okay, Devil’s Eye, written by Meredith DePaolo. Inspired by a true story, which as we all know means nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing. Everything was inspired by a true story, but I get it. It comes up in horror all the time. Obviously this is going to be a horror movie. They love saying inspired by a true story, as if that will make it scarier. Eh, no. [laughs]

**John:** Amityville Horror.

**Craig:** No. No. It’s not scarier because it might — it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It never happens.

**John:** A friend of mine believes every horror sort of happened, so whenever something is based on a real thing he’s like, oh, it’s based on a real…

Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** Your friend needs to go back to my 2015 resolution. Sit down, don’t be stupid, get back up.

**John:** You know, here’s the challenge is — I’m not saying that my friend is stupid — but people who are stupid, they don’t know they’re stupid. That’s the inherent irony.

**Craig:** That’s that whole syndrome or whatever they call it. There’s a name for that thing where people who can’t sing don’t know they can’t sing, so they think they can sing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the name of it. We’ll find it and stick it in the show notes. But, yes, that. Okay, all right, so, sorry Meredith. Devil’s Eye, written by Meredith DePaolo, inspired by a true story.

So, we begin looking out at Kentucky’s Green River Valley, Dawn. And the title tells us we’re in Little Hope, Kentucky, in February 1812. We’re looking out over endless acres of winter forest and then we see a little small mining town there in the distance. We hear the sound of a raptor. We go to a forest clearing, a couple of red hawks are fighting over some raw meat and it is revealed that in fact this is from a dead man in his 30s, splattered in mud. His throat has been cut and the hawks are pecking out his eyes

We go to black. And then cut to more black where we hear the sounds of a child named Albert saying, “Let me out,” and a couple of bullies, Nathan and Tom, who won’t let him out. And, finally, Virginia, who appears to be a school teacher, frees Albert from the closet. We see now that we’re in a schoolhouse and Virginia kicks these two out. Virginia is — well, it’s a nice description of Virginia. She’s in her 20s, I guess, for the sake of this summary. And she comforts Albert by saying, hey, you know what? He’s scared that there’s something in the closet and she says, “There’s nothing in there. When I was a little kid my sisters used to torment me. They told me that when I was a baby I was discovered, abandoned in a cemetery. They told me that one day my real family would come and take me to live with them underground with the worms.”

And she said she had something that her father told her would keep evil away. It’s a protective amulet. And she gives Albert a little red marble with a yellow core. It’s called a Devil’s Eye. She gives it to him and says the devil can’t hurt you if he can’t see you.

And, that, is the opening to Devil’s Eye.

**John:** Yes. So, I enjoyed these pages. And, again, they look really good. The flow on the page is really nice. And it starts with some very strong imagery which plays really well. Good use of sound overall. So the “Keer, keer, keer of a raptor,” feels very good. And keer was just the right word to pick for that sound because it’s unusual. And so when we see that word on the page we have to think like, well, what does that sound like? Oh, yeah, I get what that is. That’s a very specific kind of bird cry.

A nice cut to as we’re moving from this first opening image to the second opening image. Pitch. Black. Darkness. Cut to: Pitch. Black Darkness. So, it’s a match cut to darkness, which seems unimportant, like why bother repeating the same things, but lets us know that we really are in just complete darkness as we’re experiencing this next moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re inside the closet with these kids. I wanted a parenthetical extension of off-screen or unseen for these guys, because by the time — there’s a lot of dialogue happening in the dark there, and it got to be a little — I got to start to wonder about whether I was supposed to be seeing anything or not see anything at the bottom of page one.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And then we get into the school house. And so I, like you, enjoyed the description of Virginia Dennison. She needed to be upper cased when she was first introduced. “Her porcelain skin contrasts with a dark mane pulled into a loose bun. She is fiercely independent and just about the only pristine thing in this hardscrabble town.”

So, like the word pristine. That’s the thing I liked most about this. The rest of the stuff — I feel like there’s a better version of some of those sentences. Because I haven’t seen the town yet, so I don’t really know what the hardscrabble means. Hardscrabble doesn’t quite mean dirty. If you can contrast her pristineness to the schoolhouse or something else that’s immediately in our environment, that could be great as well.

And then she has her dialogue. And they’re talking about sort of the Devil’s Eye and her history. I looked overall the idea that we are a horror movie set in an 1812 environment. That felt really good. Page three got kind of proppy to me. I don’t know if you noticed this. So, she has a letter opener and then on page three a charm falls from the letter opener. Albert picks it up.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A small silver butterfly. And then she’s going to give him this red marble with a yellow core called the Devil’s Eye. It’s like, man, that’s a lot of props.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s holding a lot of stuff.

**John:** She’s holding a lot of stuff. So, that got to be a little confusing, but I think I was overall interested in sort of what kind of horror movie was going to happen in this 1812 town.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m pretty much right there with you on all this stuff. I mean, again, I’d love for people to take a look at the way these pages lay out. They look correct. There’s only a couple spots where there is — I mean, for instance on page two the paragraph, the action paragraph “School teacher Virginia Dennison,” that’s the one that goes to four lines and it shouldn’t and I’ll talk about why. But nice reportorial style on page one. The way that the body is revealed is terrific.

Using a hawk to peck out a dead man’s eyes to transition us between scenes, a great example of transition. We talk about how important those transitions are a lot.

I like how confused we are for a moment, but I do think at some point you’re going to want to consider getting a slug line in there sooner, because the question is how long do you want to be in darkness really? Let me out. So, again, we don’t have this off-screen or V/O commentary, but let’s assume that we can’t see Albert, Nathan, or Tom, or Virginia. These are the lines we have in total darkness:

“Let me out.”

“Can you see him then?”

“Is it the creeper? She said he had business with you.”

“Why are you boys still here?”

“Help.”

“Step away. Now.”

And then, boom, way too long. Way too long. We’ll just get bored. Honestly, we’ll just get bored in the darkness. We get it. It seems to me that there may be a better way to do that and we’re going to want a slug line sooner, frankly. At some point someone is going to need to put a scene number on this thing anyway.

I thought that — you want to think, Meredith, about Nathan and Tom here, your bullies. First of all, they sound way too bullyish. “Look at him. Did you pee yourself?” Eh, I don’t think did you pee yourself — did you pee yourself sounds weirdly modern for 1812.

**John:** It feels 1970s in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s got to be something.

**Craig:** Something was off there. But, more importantly, I think what you’re telling me is that Nathan and Tom and Albert all believe that there is something in there and it’s the creeper. And they don’t — they don’t seem like they’re serious enough in a weird way. They seem like both, they’ve put you in there with something supernatural and also they’re mostly just jerks who want to see if you’ll pee yourself. I was a little confused about them.

Virginia’s description, porcelain skin, dark mane, that’s all good. “She is fiercely independent and just about the only pristine thing in this hardscrabble town.” No she’s not. She’s just a woman standing in a room right now. And I do not know any of that, nor can you rely on me knowing that because of this.

I would cut all of that. Show me. As we’ve just described with the Chuck Palahniuk article. Show me how fiercely independent she is. Have a moment where we see that she is fiercely independent. When she walks outside, then that’s when you can say, as you described the town, that she is just set apart from it. This is not the place to do this.

Let’s talk about the props. In her hands she holds the day’s post. I believe that means mail. You could say mail. Either way, why? [laughs] Is the mail important now? Because she’s going to be doing other stuff with her hands. But I did like how she starts off like this very comforting typical schoolmarm. Oh you. There’s nothing in there, see? It’s just a closet.

And then she just starts on this creepy story. And I hope that the intention is that there is something creepy about Virginia, because this like very calm — it’s like if your mom said, “Look, look, see there’s nothing in the closet. Now when I was a kid, there was something in my closet.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s kind of the way it came out for me. I mean, she gives him this story that was unpleasant. And made me wonder if perhaps she does think that there are things in the closet. And if she does, then I’d love a little hint of that prior to this moment. This is not the place to do the silver butterfly. We cannot have a scene where Albert is gathering multiple talisman. But in general, there was a vibe. There was a tension to it. I liked the way that the characters were working with each other.

Albert is undescribed, I should say. I assume he’s the hero of our movie. And all I know about him is that he’s 10.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’d love a little bit more there. Even if you delay it, but that’s all I know. So, pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. And, obviously, you could really feel how this was inspired by a true story. [laughs] Oh, baloney, Meredith. But, still, good job.

**John:** A couple things to look at on the page. Title over: Little Hope, Kentucky, February 1812. Break that into two lines. Because it’s useful I find if you’re going to do a title over, show it sort of the way the title would actually look. You would probably put the February 1812 on a separate line. You wouldn’t run that through as one thing. So, give us your two lines there. That’s nice. Center it.

We talk about the camera twice in the opening and we don’t necessarily need them both times. So, right now the sentence reads, “The camera soars high over endless acres of winter forest.” And [unintelligible] could do very well for us. Soaring high over endless acres of winter forest. Get rid of the camera there.

Similarly, we have, “The camera moves beyond the hawks to a pair of dirty black boots.” Moving beyond the hawks, again, there’s a way of getting rid of that sense that some external device, a camera, is there. Just let us be the audience. We are moving through stuff. You don’t need the “we.”

**Craig:** I mean, I’ll do the we in those moments. I’ll either do the subjectless version the way you are. Sometimes I’ll do we. I never write “the camera,” ever.

**John:** Yeah. You don’t need to.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “School teacher Virginia Dennison accosts them.” Accosts? Yeah, maybe not the right verb for this. And I want to talk about sort of the nature of boys locking boys into closets, because I think there was an opportunity here to sort of rethink sort of how the closet stuff started.

Usually in sort of the Bloody Mary scenario where one kid is in the closet, in my experience, and this is just sort of me from scouts maybe, but it’s like it’s a dare. And it’s like, oh, you have to be in there and count to six, but you can’t last 60 seconds in there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so someone goes in and then they freak out. So, if we started with Albert like counting up and then he freaks out and wants to go out and they won’t let him out, that feels like there is tension there that I kind of get.

Here I just, like, well who are those bully boys? It didn’t feel as rewarding. And so if it had been a dare going in there, then I think his coming out and then the conversation he has with Dennison, there would just be — there would be a better narrative going into. And so you can get to all the same stuff with the little Devil’s Eye marble and all that stuff, but I’d understand what had happened beforehand much more easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other thing to consider, Meredith, is that total darkness, oh well actually side note, I am really tired of this Blank. Blank. Blank. Thing. You just period. Don’t. Get it.

I see this constantly. It’s very, I don’t’ know, I just find it very affected. Pitch black darkness is perfectly fine as opposed to Pitch. Black. Darkness.

But Pitch. Black. Darkness. is not actually scary, because there’s no chance you’re going to see anything. We’re not scared of nothing. We’re scared of something. I wonder if there is a possibility that we could see maybe a little.

**John:** Yeah! A little is better.

**Craig:** And if he’s in there and he’s scared of these bullies or scared of something and then there’s like a little noise or a rustling and he turns in the closet and he sees something that we see that scares the hell out of us. And then the door opens. It’s just a glimpse.

And then when the teacher kind of takes him back in there he realizes, oh, it was just a blank and a blank. Because then at the end of these pages we’ll look back at the closet, the door slightly ajar, and we’ll probably get a hint, oh, but maybe actually there was something in there. I mean, that feels —

**John:** That’s what you want. The lights filling below the door, or split or coming in through the keyhole.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s probably going to be better for you than the absolute darkness.

**Craig:** Pitch. Black. Darkness.

**John:** Darkness.

Let’s look at page three. There’s a parenthetical here in Virginia’s second block of dialogue.
“You know, Albert, when I was your age my sisters tormented me terribly. (Whisper) We’re not meant to dislike our family.” So the parenthetical should be its own line. And they’re not usually capitalized, so just look at sort of standard formatting for that.

Her third block of dialogue. “They told me that when I was a baby my father discovered me abandoned in a cemetery.” Wait, did they tell you this when you were a baby?

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** So, the when is ambiguous there. So, there is a better sentence you can find there. They told me my father discovered me as a baby in the cemetery. Or there is a version that makes it clear when this actually happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is nothing wrong with not writing this like an essay. They told me my father found me in the cemetery. I was a baby. I mean, people don’t talk in these full flowing completely sentences. You don’t have to — you definitely don’t want to get too clausal — clausal is not a word — but you know what I mean.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Clausy.

**John:** I think clausal is a word.

**Craig:** Clausal?

**John:** Clausal?

**Craig:** Clausal.

**John:** It’s a clausal disappointment.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was terrible.

**John:** [laughs] That was terrible. Let’s go to our final Three Page Challenge. Do you want to do this one?

**Craig:** Sure. This is Going Om as in Om, written by Mimi Jeffries. So, we are in Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re inside a suburban home, the Stanton household, in the bedroom. It is 5:59am.

A grandfather clock’s minute hand clicks to 6:00am and chimes. We see Allen Stanton, he’s 75, wakes up, rolls to his side, and there is his wife, Eleanor, who is dead.

He turns back and stares blankly at the ceiling. The clock stops chiming. We are now in the bedroom where a body bag is zipped over Eleanor’s head. Then we go outside. Allen sits on the steps with his dog while the EMTs unceremoniously put Eleanor in the ambulance and drive away not in any kind of rush. And he just sits watching it.

Now we have a title sequence where Allen drives his rusty Chevy through a neighborhood of old, well-loved two-story homes, listening to Johnny Cash, passing crop fields covered with winter frost. A closed strip mall. And, finally, ending up at a drab one-story building. This is the Real Copiers’ headquarters. And Allen walks in, goes through — it’s obviously holiday time. The cubicles are all decorated. The only other person in the building is a female janitor he just walks by. Goes to his office, where Mallory suddenly appears. She’s his pudgy, eager-to-please secretary.

She’s all sorts of bubbly. He’s not. He’s just about business. And then he asks her for help. He is making copies of coffin — he’s printing out basically what looks like a coffin catalog. And he tells Mallory, “Get two coffins.” And those are the three pages of Going Om, by Mimi Jeffries.

**John:** And I adored these pages.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I love characters who are under-reacting to horrific events. And I really could see this and feel this. And I wasn’t sure what was going on all the time, but I felt confident that Mimi did know what was going on and that my attention was going to be rewarded for going on this journey with her.

So, there were some moments at the very start that I worried like, oh, this is going to be overwritten. Our very first scene header is two lines long and doesn’t necessarily need to be two lines long. Whereas CINCINNATI, OHIO – SUBURBS – STANTON HOUSEHOLD – MASTER BEDROOM – JANUARY 3, 2013 – 5:59 A.M., a shorter — you could get rid of that subhead, that scene header all together. And I think I would be just as happy.

But I love that it’s just like deadpan and flat and just sort of moves through it. And then we get to our title sequence. A perfectly good way to sort of set up the nature of the town and what things are like. Is it ambiguous whether it’s the same day or the next day? Yes, but that’s kind of okay, too.

Ultimately, we’re going to realize it is the same day. He’s in the Copier Headquarters. I like the idea of Mallory. She has a line on page three that I didn’t think was quite earned.

“How many copies do you want?”

“One is fine.”

“Stapled or paper-clipped.”

“Which ever.”

She says, “This is going to be the best year yet, don’t you think?” And I was like, ooh, that felt a little much of a stretch. If she could be a little bit more specific about this is going to be our biggest sales year ever, or I think we really have a shot this year. I think we could beat last year’s numbers this year. If it’s something that wasn’t just so generically in opposition to what we know we just saw I would feel better about that line.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then it ends on coffins. And like, you know, the contemplation of like, oh, if you get two coffins then it’s a discount. That’s just a great, I don’t know, deadpan moment again. I just was really excited to see where this was going to go.

**Craig:** I agree. Loved them. Mimi, great job. Once again everyone playing at home, look at the way the pages lay out. There is not one paragraph — I feel like we’re getting to people. Honestly. I’m going to give myself credit for this. I feel like we’re getting to them.

There’s not one action paragraph that’s longer than two lines, personally love when people put the extra space in front of the slug lines the way she did. I’m a slug line bolder, so I was particularly happy with this, too.

**John:** Yeah, so this script uses double returns plus bold headlines.

**Craig:** Which is the Mazin method. So, this is all about informing me two things at once. And this is what — I keep talking about this notion that we cannot live in scenes that give us one glimpse of what we want people to feel. We need to give them multiple glimpses. We need to know what’s happening and we need to know how that matters to the people in it. And by that we learn about the people in it.

I’m learning about Allen Stanton, the character, through this reaction and experience of his wife’s sudden death. And I can tell you a lot of things, just from this first scene, which has no dialogue and has one action essentially. Allen rolls over, sees his dead wife, rolls back and stares at the ceiling. I know that this is not something that he was not expecting. I know that he is depressed. I know that he is beyond depressed. And I also know that his life is about to change completely.

This is all great, from this little tiny moment. I love that. I also thought there was something quite beautiful about these two lines. “TWO EMTs unceremoniously carry Eleanor to an ambulance on the street. They effortlessly lift her into the back.” Let me just stop there. This is why I can just say Mimi is a good writer. And we can talk all the time about structure and techniques and what to do and what not to do. And we saw and how many lines in action. You cannot teach this.

You cannot teach a feeling for what matters to people. And you cannot teach insight. So, here’s a man watching his dead wife being taken away. And Mimi so smartly says they effortlessly lift her into the back. She’s nothing. She’s literally nothing to them.

And then, “The doors slam shut. Allen watches as the ambulance drives off, its sirens silent, not in any rush.” Ah! Ah! It’s just so good. So good. Right? And I love that he’s watching, you know. It’s a choice to have characters watch things. That’s the kind of writing that’s a gift to a director.

**John:** Well, it’s a gift to a director, and I felt like the director was Alexander Payne. Like, literally by the end of the first page I was like, oh, Alexander Payne would direct this movie, because it felt like that world of like it’s a comedy but it’s not like uproariously funny. It is a characters in situations in really grounded, real environments who are sort of doing the best they can.

And I got that off the first page even before we actually hear him say anything, which is great.

**Craig:** It’s terrific. I see that there is a call out for a title sequence. I’m a big fan of calling out title sequences if you want one. Mimi, you don’t give us enough to justify a credit sequence here. You give us basically a montage of Allen driving around this rust belt winter town. That’s not going to really carry you through a title sequence, unless it just goes on and on and on, or unless you imply that it goes on and on and on.

Anyway, something to think about. Given what you have here, I’m not sure you need it.

I had a little bit of confusion — a couple points of confusion here. So, Allen goes to the Real Copiers Headquarters. And it’s decorated but no one else is there except for female janitor. Now, I think the idea is that later the place will be properly open and everybody will be there.

**John:** That it’s just early.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I didn’t get that. I got confused. At first I thought it was he’s come in on a Sunday or something. But then suddenly his assistant is there, even though we just heard there was only one other soul in the building.

So, help me out with that. If time has gone by, show me that time has gone by.

**John:** Yeah. My hunch is what she means is so Allen goes in and like no one is there yet, and then when the assistant comes in, Allen has been at his desk for awhile and she’s just now arrived.

So, if you had her like putting down her purse and like poking her head in the door, that might tell us that, oh, the assistant has just come here and we see other people like going to their desks or something like that. The day has started.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure that that would be enough for me. You know, when somebody is sitting in a place, and then the next moment with that person sitting in a place is an hour or two later, I need something. I need either to see some sign — visual sign of progress, or something, or cut outside to see cars now pulling in.

I need a little something.

**John:** Or the coffee maker starts, or someone is putting the coffee maker in. Like getting the day started.

**Craig:** Yeah. I need to know that time has jumped. I got a little confused there with that. I like that he’s all business. I wish I knew — this is another just small thing, Mimi, but I find like 90 percent of my conversations about my own writing come down to these “how can we not make the reader confused about things that aren’t important so that they can really appreciate the things that are.”

He works at a company called Real Copiers. But this is not like a Kinko’s Office because it’s an office building. It’s like the supervising office of a chain of stores called Real Copiers, I think, because it has cubicles and stuff. But now he’s going to do copying.

**John:** Yeah. I got confused about that, too. So, it’s just like, wait, so it’s like a guy who works for Xerox who makes Xeroxes. And it’s like, but wait, is it important? And I think it’s probably not important that he’s making copies.

**Craig:** It’s not. Or he’s printing out from a crusty printer. But it seems like if you’re a copying headquarters. I don’t know. I got really confused by that. And so that’s just something to think about if there’s maybe a way to help me with that.

I totally agree that Mallory felt constructed for irony. And it’s perfectly fine to have people say things that are ironic if it feels natural. We don’t want to feel like you rigged the game.

**John:** 100 percent. And I felt like it was a little too rigged for her to say that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But at the end, you get the sense also from this glum thing of if you get two it’s 25% off, actually when he says — or “Allen pours over the coffin printouts. Mallory stands nervously.”

Allen, to himself, “If you get two, it’s 25% off.”

I almost think that should be reading. You know, like he’s actually learning about this. Get two. I would actually say if you get two it’s 25% off. If he takes out his credit card he should repeat those words: get two.

But also it’s great, because it’s giving me — it’s telling me how fatalistic he is. It’s telling me he’s depressed. It’s also telling me that he believes he’s about to die, too.

**John:** Yeah. He’s cheap. It gives us a great world outlook on Allen at this moment.

**Craig:** Exactly. All really good stuff. I mean, who knows where this goes, but the good news, Mimi, is that not only were you able to structure three pages well and accomplish a lot in three pages, and honor the precious real estate of these first three pages, but you actually have interesting insights.

You’re a smart person who is seeing things. You know how to build moments. Very encouraging. So, bad news is we are now expecting you to do well.

**John:** Agreed. The only last thing I want to point out is midway through page three, “Several pages lurch from a crusty printer. Its pages filled with different makes and models of coffins.” The “its” doesn’t apply to anything. So, their pages, if it’s meant to be the pages, then it has to be their pages. But I think you can actually just get rid of that and just stick a comma there. So, several pages lurch from a crusty printer, each page filled with different makes and models of coffins.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Those two sentences together tripped me up because it was actually an impossible subject.

**Craig:** Yes. And also take a look at page one you’ve got a couple of errant capitalizations. In the first, “Allen turns back and stares blankly at the ceiling. The Clock stops chiming.” That’s miscapitalized. And down below, “Allen passes crop fields covered with Winter frost.” That should also be lower case.

**John:** Yup. But really, really good.

**Craig:** Really good.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. So, I actually have a trio of One Cool Things, but they were all gifts from Stuart Friedel. Who, Stuart Friedel who is also the producer of our podcast, but also weirdly his secret talent is he’s the best gift giver in the planet.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Like literally he’d been working for me for two weeks and it was my daughter’s birthday and he found like the absolute perfect gift for himself to give my daughter. So, he’s just really good at this.

Here are the three gifts that he got me. And all three things will be links in the show notes. First he got me a cake mold that creates 20-sided dice, like D&D dice.

**Craig:** I love that. Love those.

**John:** So, they’re like little cupcakes, but, you know, they’re 20-sided dice. And it seems impossible, but it works really, really well. It’s one of those rubbery molds and you pour in from the top and it was great. He got me a Too Many Cooks shirt featuring Smarf, but it’s in French.

**Craig:** Smarf en Francais?

**John:** En Francais? And he got me a Death Star ice mold, so for making ice cubes that are in the shape of a Death Star.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s spectacular.

**John:** It’s well done Stuart Friedel. So, those are my three One Cool Things are the gifts I got from Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** That’s just spectacular. Stuart, oh Stuart. He’s the best.

**John:** He also got my husband a bunch of Japanese Kit Kat bars, because that was just like a random conversation they had about how much the Japanese love Kit Kat bars.

**Craig:** Okay. So, when Mike eats those Kit Kat bars, what he has to do is take a bite and then put his hand in front of his mouth and giggle.

**John:** [laughs] Perfect.

**Craig:** Hehe.

**John:** He does that anyway.

**Craig:** [laughs] I love it. I got one D&D themed gift this year from Missy. She gave this — it’s actually kind of cool. They say it’s a true unweighted die. And it’s this big plastic D20. And you roll it. And if you do get a D20, it lights up and flashes.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Critical Hit.

**Craig:** Critical Hit Die. I have a feeling that it’s not truly weighted, so it will not be considered — Kevin will not let us use it.

My One Cool Thing, my first One Cool Thing for 2015, is Vitamin D3.

**John:** I don’t know what this is.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a Vitamin. Do I need to go back to that? Do you know what Vitamins are?

**John:** You know, honestly, if it really comes down it, I’m not sure I could totally tell you what a Vitamin is. But I want to learn what Vitamin D3 is. Because I know that you take Vitamins because they’re a central component to good health and they are things that your body sometimes produces and sometimes takes in from other foods.

**Craig:** Vitamins are chemicals that essentially help our bodies metabolize certain things, including certain chemicals, molecules, that we need to live or stay healthy.

And if you’re listening to this, you know from many, many rants in the past that I am a very skeptical person. Generally speaking, the idea of Vitamin supplements is baloney. Vitamin C, we are awash in Vitamin C. It is a total waste. It does not prevent colds. People take Vitamin B12 shots are wasting their time. The doctors are stealing your money. It does nothing. You do not have a Vitamin B deficiency.

Vitamin A, we get plenty of Vitamin A. It’s all in food, basically. It’s in food. We don’t need it. Our bodies make some of it.

However, there is a real legitimate issue in this country with Vitamin D deficiency. And when I say deficiency, I mean something that they can literally test and quantify. You’re supposed to have a certain amount of Vitamin D in your blood. And most people, including myself, repeatedly when they get tested have a legitimate, quantifiable Vitamin D deficiency. Why?

Because generally speaking we stay out of the sun now. Vitamin D primarily is manufactured in the skin when it is exposed to ultraviolet radiation by the sun. But, of course, we either use sunscreen or we stay out of the sun because we don’t want skin cancer. And milk is fortified with Vitamin D. It’s not necessarily the most absorbable version of Vitamin D. And a lot of people just don’t drink milk. I don’t sit around drinking milk.

So, what do you do if you’re a pasty, white, Jewish guy like me that doesn’t drink milk and doesn’t go outside? You take supplements. Vitamin D3 is the supplement you want. And why? What does Vitamin D actually do? Well, there’s a lot of stuff they say it does that it doesn’t really do. But the biggest — the biggest thing that it does, it seems to help the immune system. It does seem to be correlated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment as you go on and on.

And it does seem to have some effect on your bone health. That’s the one that people are most aware of. You know, there’s not a direct link between Vitamin D supplements and preventing osteoporosis or something like that, but they do feel that there is some degree of help in say reducing things like fracturing of bones as you get older.

It doesn’t take much Vitamin D3 to get you to where you should be via blood test. But if your doctor doesn’t test for Vitamin D deficiency, ask them to. You may be surprised to find out that you are deficient. And if you get really deficient, then you get rickets. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, no rickets for me please.

**Craig:** No, you don’t want rickets.

**John:** Well, like Homer when Burns put up his sun-blocking machine and he had enough of these damn rickets.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. Rickets! When I was a kid, I had this book, it was basically a big medical book for kids and they had one little section on vitamin deficiency diseases. And there was one picture of a kid who had pellagra which is a vitamin-something deficiency. I don’t know which one. Vitamin B something. And it was his face. And it had disfigured him.

And that scared me more than anything. The kid with pellagra. Oh my god.

**John:** So you ate your Flintstones chewable vitamins after that point.

**Craig:** Well, the truth was there was no chance — I mean, it was a picture of a kid from 1930 Appalachia and, you know, I was in Staten Island. I wasn’t going to get pellagra. I was going to get something else from breathing in the dump air.

But, you definitely do want to take Vitamin D3 supplements if you are Vitamin D deficient, not if you are not.

**John:** I think that is wise advice.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. So, that’s our show for today. I want to thank our writers for sending in their samples. If you have three pages of your own that you would like us to take a look at, the place to visit is johnaugust.com/threepage. And there are instructions there for how you can send in those pages to us so we can take a look at them on the air.

If you have a question for me or for Craig Mazin, something that is short that we may answer on Twitter, ask us on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. For longer questions you can write into ask@johnaugust.com.

You can find us on iTunes. And if you’re on iTunes, leave us a rating, because that helps other people find us and listen to our podcast. While you in iTunes, you can also download the Scriptnotes App. That’s also in the Android App Store. And through those apps you can listen to all the back episodes. There is a premium feed for $2 a month.

**Craig:** Two.

**John:** Two minor dollars a month. Gives you access to all the back catalog and special bonus episodes. We have an upcoming dirty show that we need to get recorded.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, we got to do that.

**John:** Yeah, we got to do that. And get that out to all of our premium subscribers. So, that is something you can do as well.

You can find out more information about the premium feed and all those back episodes at scriptnotes.net is where you actually can sign up for that.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. Matthew does a lot of our outros, but we also have some other great composers who have written outros for us, so if you would like to send us one of those outros, you can put it up on SoundCloud is great and tag it Scriptnotes, but also send us an email to ask@johnaugust.com and let us know it’s there so we’ll listen to it and put it on the end of a show.

And, that is it for this week. Craig, Happy 2015.

**Craig:** Happy 2015. A nice pointy year. And I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** All right. Bye.

End of Recording.

Links:

* [The Year of Outrage](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/12/the_year_of_outrage_2014_everything_you_were_angry_about_on_social_media.html) on Slate
* [North Korea responds with fury to US sanctions over Sony Pictures hack](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/04/north-korea-fury-us-sanctions-sony)
* The LA Times on [The Interview’s opening weekend](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-box-office-the-interview-unbroken-into-the-woods-20141229-story.html#page=1)
* Chuck Palahniuk [on thought verbs](http://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-%E2%80%9Cthought%E2%80%9D-verbs)
* Three pages by [Mike Litzenberg & Bridge Stuart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MikeLitzenbergBridgeStuart.pdf)
* Three pages by [Meredith DePaolo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MeredithDePaolo.pdf)
* [Dunning–Kruger effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
* Three pages by [Mimi Jeffries](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MimiJeffries.pdf)
* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [D20 Critical Hit Mini Cake Pan](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1cd7/?srp=5) and [Death Star Ice Mold](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f0b6/?srp=3) on Think Geek, and [Smarf L’Héroïque](http://shirt.woot.com/offers/Smarf%20L’H%C3%A9ro%C3%AFque?ref=cnt_ctlg_dgn_2) on Shirt.Woot
* [Critical Hit LED D20 Die](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/deaa/) on Think Geek
* [Vitamin D3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D) on Wikipedia
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/lotteries-lightning-strikes-and-twist-endings).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Before we start the show today, I want to let you know about the live show happening on December 11th in Hollywood. It’s Scriptnotes with me and Craig and Aline and special guests Jane Espenson, Derek Haas and B.J. Novak. So we did this last year. It was a tremendously fun time. You should come.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow, November 12th. So if you would like to come, please go buy a ticket. There’s a link in the show notes but you can also go to the Writers Guild Foundation site. That’s wgfoundation.org. As always, it benefits the Writers Guild Foundation which is an awesome charity. And we had a fun time last year. We’re going to have a fun time this year. So come join us if you’d like and we’ll get on with the show. Thanks.

[intro tone]

Hello and Welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 170 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So Craig, last Sunday I had a really strange experience.

**Craig:** Tell me all about it.

**John:** I went to Long Beach where I saw the West Coast premiere of Big Fish: The Musical.

**Craig:** Oh, that must have been both disorienting and pleasing at the same time.

**John:** It was. It was surreal in the best possible ways. So this is the production that actually bought all of our stuff when we closed on Broadway. So they bought our sets, our props, our costumes, our wigs. And so it’s that weird experience of seeing something that is incredibly familiar yet incredibly different at the same time. So it’s the same production in terms of the script and the music but it’s just different because it’s different people doing it. It’s a different stage. It’s at this really quite big house, the Carpenter Theatre in Long Beach. And I kind of loved it, at the same time it was sort of an out-of-body experience.

**Craig:** I know that it’s hard for a lot of people to have seen the Broadway show because it’s in New York only but it was my pleasure to see it. And one of the big show-stopping elements were these big elephant butts, which sounds kind of crazy when I say it like that, but they were. It was very impressive production design. Did they have the elephant butts?

**John:** They have the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s what was so fascinating is because this production is original theatre, it didn’t have automation of the stage. So they had a lot of our set pieces but they didn’t have all the magic under the stage things to make stuff move around. So they have to like push things around. And they did a remarkable job sort of accommodating what they needed to do for that. And they were able to do a lot of the choreography with the Broadway production but not all of the choreography.

So it was actually just genuinely fascinating. It’s an experience that, as a screenwriter, you and I would never have.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To see the same text but with completely different people and being done without any of your sort of direct involvement. And so in many cases, people are making similar choices to the Broadway production because it’s just that’s the text. I mean like you’re going to play things a certain way because that just is what makes sense. But then sometimes a person will do something that is just different than intention. And sometimes that was kind of fascinating.

So Amos Calloway who, in the movie, is Danny DeVito, in the Broadway stage production it was Brad Oscar who was fantastic. The Amos that I saw in this version was sort of like I would say like a drunken cowardly lion, which is just a very different choice but it kind of worked. And so it was cool to see something very different.

So I would recommend anyone who makes a Broadway musical [laughs] to go visit a regional production of their own show because you’ll find it fascinating and surreal.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. I’m glad it’s enjoying a second life and hopefully many more lives to come. I can see the show being done in schools.

**John:** We will be doing it in schools. So we have 60 productions this year of Big Fish across the country. Abilene Christian University did it in Texas. There’s a lot of university productions. Eventually there will be a Big Fish junior version like a school version —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which will probably be different because I think a fifth grade musical about death is probably not the most ideal subject matter. So I will do some book changes to accommodate those needs.

**Craig:** There is actually some very interesting junior versions out there. My son was Jean Valjean in the Junior Les Mis in which some people actually were allowed to die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Éponine was allowed to die but Fantine was sent to a hospital [laughs] but then returns later as a ghost. So you just sort of understood that maybe the hospital wasn’t that great. But various changes were made. No one ever referred to prostitution or things like that. But your show, I think, wouldn’t require much.

**John:** No. I mean, our show is incredibly wholesome and family-friendly. The challenge is just how do you , you know, the idea of a father dying is quite a bit to put on the backs of a grade school cast. And also the split between the past and the present, that’s kind of sophisticated. And then to be able to show that and really act that when you have maybe a 12-year-old doing that could be challenging.

So I think we will find a way to simplify aspects of the storytelling so that it can best be the story of a son wanting to learn the truth about his father’s tales within the framework of what Big Fish should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think you’ll find also that a huge part of the job of juniorizing the musical is making it much, much shorter and taking out — choosing which songs should just go because they can’t sing all of them.

**John:** Absolutely. And which songs can move from being a solo number to a group number because —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have so many kids.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right.

**John:** So today on the program, let us answer some questions from listeners. We have a whole bunch that have been stacking up, so we’ll dig into that mail bag. We’re also going to talk about The Five Types of Twist Endings, this great blog post by Alec Worley. And I want to talk about lightning strikes and lotteries and sort of that sense of whether something becomes popular or successful because of its inherent awesomeness or just because magic happens.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s get to it, but first a tiny bit of follow- up. Last week I announced Writer Emergency, this pack of ideas and prompts that we’re starting on Kickstarter. And Craig, you had to venture to the Kickstarter site.

**Craig:** Here’s the sick part is that I gave you money —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because you’re my friend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And then today, I gave our editor, Matthew Chilelli, some money because he does a really good job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s killing me.

**John:** It’s killing you. I really just want to dig into what it felt like to press that green Back This Project button. How did it feel when you clicked that and knew that you were supporting the Kickstarter economy?

**Craig:** It felt like I was betraying everything that I believe in. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s basically I felt like I had turned my back on my values and had contributed to the weakening of civilization.

**John:** Craig, I want to thank you for that because you’ve helped and I want to thank, we’ve had so many backers. We had more than 2,000 backers and we —

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys did great out there.

**John:** We did great out there. So we were trying to raise $9,000. As we’re recording this, we’ve crossed $57,000 which is just nuts. So that’s fantastic. So now it’s pushing through the rest of the Kickstarter and putting these out in the world and then getting them to the hands of kids in creative writing programs across the country and around the world who could hopefully benefit from these. So I want to thank you, Craig, personally —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I know this was not an easy thing for you. But you broke through that seal, that barrier just for this one and then you supported Matthew Chilelli and now you’re just not going to be able to stop supporting Kickstarter projects.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s very easy for me to stop. In fact, what I really want is for Stuart to have a Kickstarter that I don’t support [laughs] just as a matter of principle. I don’t care what it is. He’s getting nothing. By the way, do you think you’re going to make money on these things? Do you think you’ll profit at all?

**John:** We might profit a little bit. So here’s the deal. It’s like as I described on the first podcast when we talked about this, is printing playing cards scales pretty well. So they’re really expensive to make those first batch of decks, but the more you can make, the cheaper per unit it is. The challenge is we’re actually doubling that because we have to, we’re sending them out to kids. And then there’s some things that don’t scale like postage and like sending stuff out to backers around the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’re not going to make a lot out of it but I think we’re going to sort of do what I wanted to do out of the project which is sort of bend the universe in a slightly better direction. So it’s been exciting to do that and sort of engage with that community which has its own sort of esoteric rules and customs and try to both be a part of that world of Kickstarter and also introduce that Kickstarter kind of world to people who are backing their very first projects like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, now that I hear that you are going to make some money on this, I’m full of regret because I would have just given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would just have bought you out, given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is like Shark Tank for —

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** For 100 percent equity in your company, it’s just, but now I’ve given money and —

**John:** But you’re going to be getting a deck of cards. And you said you actually wanted to donate —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The extra cards. So I think you did like the 12-pack.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want all the cards to go to the less fortunate budding screenwriters out there.

**John:** Great. And that’s a thing that backers can always do. So when you get your survey at the end of this asking for your mailing address, there’s this little field saying Special Instructions. You’re can just say I’m Craig Mazin and I want to give all my cards to the kids.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. You can just say I want to Mazin this.

**John:** I want to Mazin this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s really the term that we’re going to use for this. And so when Stuart sees that on the instruction sheet, he’ll know, okay, this is the Craig Mazin special.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Awesome. Let’s get to our things today.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley, and whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.

So this blog post talks through twist endings and it defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal —

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Reversal of Identity in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster so —

**John:** Yeah. The Crying Game where the woman you love is not —

**Craig:** Is not a woman.

**John:** Ta-da.

**Craig:** Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.

**John:** That would also maybe play into the third version which is the Reversal of Perception. And Reversal of Perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was. My movie, The Nines, has that aspect where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all. But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.

**Craig:** Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. So Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.

**John:** Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen because in some ways, a novel, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal. But a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes you spent eight hours on this thing and like then to say like, oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you, it might feel like a betrayal.

**Craig:** No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.

One of the other twist endings he identifies is the Reversal of Motive.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. So he cites Seven where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt to become, Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.

**John:** Obviously reversal of motive is often found in comedies also where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. So in Go, in the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products.

So their motive was very different and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting. And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect. So like, oh, that’s the twist and then the next scene, you’re going to see that they’re actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So sometimes you can misdirect twice or like you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. You know what just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And she is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there under cover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.

And here he also has Reversal of Fortune in which, this one was a little, I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory — what you thought you were going to get you’re not quite getting.

**John:** Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating”. And so this is basically there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly like that Twilight Zone kind of fiction —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** May have that like suddenly at the end the great and short version where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of my favorite Simpsons jokes was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it. [laughs] So he doesn’t have to go to hell but then he does finish it and he ends up in hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Where he’s put on a conveyor belt and —

**John:** And force fed doughnuts.

**Craig:** Force fed doughnuts except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many doughnuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then we have Reversal of Fulfillment.

**John:** Which I found the most challenging of the ones he describes and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is the gifts, O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.

**John:** Well, it’s not only that they’ve done this, but like one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The gifts are now useless for each other. So that was, yeah, that works. Again, it’s a little bit of an ironic. That sort of kind of is also —

**John:** It’s ironic too.

**Craig:** It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.

**John:** Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist. And so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”

So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information and then at the end providing it and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s kind of the only thing you’re story has going for it, it’s unlikely I think to be completely satisfying.

**Craig:** That’s right. You don’t want to start and I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It does not. The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie Who Dun It? All Agatha Christie stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it and you never could figure out who did it and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time.

Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her. And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high wire act to do when you, it’s not like — we all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I did not- I wasn’t sitting there thinking I wonder what the twist is. I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, well… [laughs]

**John:** Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.

**Craig:** Just like, yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.

**John:** And so it’s sort of there’s a meta level of expectation is that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, oh, but that’s not really true. And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.

What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just like a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him because three times is certainly a pattern.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. No, for sure. I mean, and frankly it started to feel a little desperate. I mean we don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently and then we can enjoy it along with them.

By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this Mystery Writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft.

Because the twist in the, and so The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first person account. A guy is living in this little town and Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him and he describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah, we like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In many ways, I think that kind of reversal of expectation, that’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. Like you thought this was going to play by the rules and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

**John:** It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.

**Craig:** Well, it’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Oh my god. And so Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is, I know what it’s parodying.

**Craig:** Repeatedly. [laughs]

**John:** Repeatedly. And then it just through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right. I want to talk about two other little Internet things that came up this week. First is Alex from Target. Do you know this whole meme, this thing that happened?

**Craig:** I do. And I have to say, this is where the Internet just occasionally pukes something out. It just randomly decides you — I’m going to make you a star.

**John:** So Alex from Target for people who weren’t aware of it or who are listening to this six months later and wonder what the hell was that? So this is what happened with Alex from Target. There was a teenage checkout boy at Target, someone took a picture of him bagging groceries and another girl on Twitter wrote, “Yo, like so hot.” And that became like a viral meme sensation and then it got remixed and it just became this whole big blowup of a thing.

But then another company, a marketing company, claimed credit for having started it, but it looks like they really didn’t, which is juts nuts also.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If someone can try to jump on and claim credit for something they didn’t do at all. But it’s just so obvious we check that they didn’t really do it. So it was just a fascinating moment of kind of these Internet lightning strikes where this is not a person who, this Alex from Target, he didn’t do anything.

**Craig:** He did nothing.

**John:** He was just, he did nothing. He was just suddenly in a place and his photo went crazy and by all accounts, at the time that we’re taping this, he seems to be handling it remarkably well in the way that I think young people now who’ve always grown up with the Internet are sort of just kind of ready to be famous in a way that we never were. [laughs]

There’s that expectation like you could be famous tomorrow.

**Craig:** Well, also, I mean Alex understands inherently that he didn’t do anything. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, there are people that want to be famous and start doing things to be famous and then they become famous either because what they do is legitimately good or it’s legitimately terrible.

**John:** Or it’s ambiguous in a way that’s, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or it’s just bizarre or amusing, whatever it is. Alex literally did nothing. [laughs] He did absolutely nothing. This is one of those, this is like when there’s a glitch in the matrix and this happens.

And I think for him I can only assume that he’s like, yeah, this is just the Internet being Internet. I don’t have anything to do with this. It could have been me, it could have been anybody.

**John:** Basically, all he did was reflect light. And that was the extent of it.

**Craig:** Literally, all he did, it’s not even a well-framed photo.

**John:** No, I think that’s partly what makes it so incredibly great and charming. So I wanted to just take a minute or two to talk through what the Alex from Target movie would be, because I guarantee you that at least a thousand screenwriters go like, oh, that’s an idea for a movie. Like what if you suddenly became famous and like for no good reason. And I wanted to think about sort of what that movie would be because we’ve made other movies, good movies, about sort of the rise of Internet culture. I mean, Social Network, one of the best of them.

And I guess in Social Network of course, he’s creating Facebook, he’s actually doing something. But that sense of being plucked from obscurity and put up on this great stage and suddenly weirdly having a platform when you kind of shouldn’t have a platform is fascinating. And there’s potential there’s something to be made there but there’s also so many pitfalls in a character who has and wants nothing and suddenly gets everything.

**Craig:** Well, one of my favorite movies of all time is the old school version of this and it’s Being There.

**John:** Oh, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think that I could easily see an Alex from Target’s version of Being There. If you were to make Being There now, that’s probably how it would go. Somebody is bagging, I mean, I don’t mean to suggest that Alex from Target is mentally challenged in any way [laughs] the way that Chauncey Gardiner was.

But somebody who’s unremarkable and perhaps even sub-remarkable becomes famous because the Internet has a weird burp and they end up being the president.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, it could totally happen.

**Craig:** It could happen.

**John:** Yeah. So I think there will likely be competing Alex from Target movies in development. And I suspect none of them will happen. But I suspect we will see this idea in general explored not because of Alex from Target but just because it’s an idea that sort of needs to be talked about in the universe is this sense of suddenly out of nowhere you can just have this giant spotlight on you and you have no way of anticipating it, controlling it, making it start, making it stop.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s a weird time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yeah, and somebody out there is pitching Jimmy from Taco Hut.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And probably selling it.

**John:** Yeah, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably.

**John:** Low six figures, yeah.

**Craig:** Low six.

**John:** Low six. The management company is involved as a producer, they shopped it around.

**Craig:** Right. The studio is, even though they haven’t gotten the script yet, they’re already thinking about who’s going to come and rewrite it.

**John:** Yeah, they are. And they’re probably going after like some of the Teen Wolf cast like Dylan O’Brien or somebody like kind of person for that role.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Totally. So in a related thing, this was already on my show notes to talk about, is this great talk that Darius Kazemi did at XOXO, this sort of, I’ll summarize and say it’s a sort of TED Talk like, but his speech was actually really fascinating because it was like the most brilliant parody of a TED Talk speech. And so I’ll link to it in the show notes, but essentially he talks about how he made it. And we’ve heard a lot of speeches about how people made it and sort of how they became successful and how they built a community.

So what he did was he played the lottery. And he would, every day he would play the lottery and really think about what numbers and he started a community and he started like a blog where like he talked about his favorite numbers and like he’d mix it up and like played numbers in different combinations or sometimes like on his mom’s birthday he’d actually play his dad’s birthday to really throw things off. And eventually like he hit it and he became like super rich.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s this brilliant parody of like how I made it but what’s so great about his speech is he actually segues into this idea of lotteries and this idea of lighting striking. And he’s a person who, this guy in real life, he makes sort of little Internet memes. And so he makes this little Twitter bots that combine random things. And so he gave a demonstration of like 50 of these different things that he’s made and combined.

And some of them are incredibly successful and some of them aren’t incredibly successful. And he can’t predict what goes viral. And his suspicion is that there is no reason. That it genuinely is just random, like Alex from Target, and that you cannot funnily predict it and shouldn’t therefore beat yourself up if something doesn’t work and you shouldn’t praise yourself when something does work because it kind of is random.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look, there are way, there is good work and bad work. There are ways to do better and there are ways to do worse. But the magic that occurs when something takes off is unpredictable and does incorporate an enormous amount of random factors.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that fascinates me. I talked a while ago, one of my Cool Things was Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a great book, which I think is —

**John:** Which I bought, which I —

**Craig:** Wait, I sent it to you.

**John:** No, you sent it to me.

**Craig:** I sent it you.

**John:** You sent it to me. You sent me the physical thing. It’s like 1,000 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a massively long book. But Gödel was a mathematician and his — and I always worry that I’m not quite getting his theorem correct, but I believe this is essentially what he said was for any system of math with rules, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. There must be things that you can’t — that are true regardless of the fact that you can’t prove that they’re true which is fascinating to me. And I feel like entertainment is the same way. There will always be things that are good and there’s no way to prove why. And you could have never gotten to them intentionally. They just happen.

**John:** Yeah. I think that absolutely is true. What is interesting about this idea of lightning strikes or lottery tickets is that in a weird way you’re more likely to win the more things you do. And so I would say for people who are looking at a writing career or like trying to get into the movie business, the more times you’re at bat, the more likely you are to hit a home run.

And so you’re much less likely to sell a spec script if you’ve written exactly one script and you’ve shown it to one person. So that exposure to many opportunities and taking many chances is much more likely to get you into a situation where you can suddenly find yourself lucky.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to strike the balance of course because there are people that shotgun a lot of things out there. One of them happens to click, but that’s the end of them because really their success was a product of nothing more than the shot-gunning.

When they talk about animal behavior, they talk about two reproductive strategies. I can’t remember, they’re defined by letters. But regardless, one of them essentially is a low quantity, high quality reproductive strategy which is a very human way of approaching it. Elephants do it this way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It takes a lot to have a child, so therefore you’re going to have fewer of them, but really put a lot of resources into protecting them and raising them. And then there’s the other way which is, screw it, I’m going to have as many kids as possible and then a bunch of them are going to die but maybe a bunch won’t. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what you find, actually, even in humans, is that when humans are in situations where there is plenty, they will go for the low-quantity, high-quality reproductive strategy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And vice versa.

**John:** The other thing which I think the lightning strikes theorem kind of misses is, especially in creative work, is iteration, in that sense of like, you know what, that first thing may not be the right idea, but by going back and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it, that’s sort of how you find what is the thing that takes hold. And, you know, with all the sort of Twitterbots this guy did, that’s not really iteration, it’s a bunch of like things moving in parallel versus sort of serially going back through and seeing like, what, how can I make this thing better? How can I take the system and tweak it and make it better, and how can I make that experience better.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, in rewriting a script, that’s iteration. That’s taking feedback and looking at the script again and saying like, okay, this is the better version of this. And you’re honestly iterating on your own ability to write because I’m certainly a better writer than I was 10 years ago because I’ve had the experience of looking at my work and saying, okay, these are strengths, these are things that are not strengths, and I can actually do things better through all that iteration process.

**Craig:** And for those of us who are making movies, our goal is to make something that is permanent. We don’t always succeed, but we try. Whereas when you’re doing pursuits like the kind that Darius is doing, there is no expectation of permanency.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you’re hoping for really is a combustion, you know.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** But everybody knows that when the combustion consumes the fuel it’s gone. I mean, there’s no chance that a meme will last forever. You know, Grumpy Cat will not be popular 10 years from now.

**John:** Yes. And so, we can love Grumpy Cat now, we can celebrate its impermanence.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But we can’t try to emulate its impermanence. We can’t try to like, to make the next Grumpy Cat. That’s probably not the right idea. We should try to make the next amazing thing. And the next amazing thing could end up blowing up like Grumpy Cat or could be a long slow burn that is remembered 10 years from now.

**Craig:** Yes, yes. But when you’re trying to make things that are permanent the high-quantity approach often will bite you in the butt.

**John:** I would agree. Let’s take a look at some questions.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the first one I have here is Jason from White Rock, British Columbia who has a location question. “How specific can you place action in the real world? Can you really place a scene on a specific street in a specific town with perhaps even a specific address? I’m a suburban Vancouver-based filmmaker, and we Vancouverites don’t have a lot of experience watching movies that are actually set in Vancouver. Mostly our city serves as a stand-in for other American towns. I probably know as much about the way addresses work in New York as I do about Vancouver itself. So when addresses are needed in your script, how specific can you make them?”

**Craig:** Well, yes, you can make the address as specific as you want. Generally speaking, it should be as specific as it needs to be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no point in saying that the building is 35 West 56th Street if you can say, well, it’s a building, you know, Midtown, you could say, or corner of 56th and 5th. But, you know, if you’re telling the story where the address becomes a matter of importance, for instance it’s a crime story and someone has lied about where they live, sure. Well then, that makes sense, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Put the specific address in.

**John:** Yeah, I think Craig and I are generally always pushing for specificity. And specificity doesn’t necessarily mean the street address, but it’s describing things in the kind of detail that makes it this house versus that house and lets us know the kinds of people who live in this house versus the kinds of people who live in that house. And so really think about what information will help your reader understand what is unique and special about these characters and their world.

And if that means really nailing down to what that street is like, great, tell us the street, but also make sure you’re giving us words that describe what that street feels like so, because we’re not going to know this. Don’t just put in a link to Google Street View, like really describe the street.

**Craig:** Yeah. What we want to know really is about people more than anything. So places exist for people to be in and we need to know what that place says about the people that are there. So, yeah, be specific, but don’t be over-specific. If the detail adds nothing for the reader it’s probably dispensable.

**John:** It is. So anything that provides feelings, sentiment, emotional detail, that’s what you want.

**Craig:** Right. Okay, well, next question is Matt from LA. And he asks, “After a long time toiling in the entertainment industry, I’ve been lucky enough to make the leap into fulltime writing and directing. As a freelancer I’ve been very busy and I’ve taken every single job that’s been offered. Now, they may not be the best projects but I’ve learned a ton and I’ve always felt good about the decision to take the job. But I foresee a near future where the various companies that have been offering me jobs will present something I don’t think is worth my time or the paycheck. As two very successful writers — ”

**John:** Ah…

**Craig:** “Very successful writers, I’m sure you’re offered projects that you feel compelled to turn down by reputable studios.” I think he means I’m sure you’re offered projects by reputable studios that you feel compelled to turn down. “How do you turn down opportunities without souring relationships? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.”

**John:** That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that happens a fair amount, I’m sure, I mean, to both of us. And so someone will send us something and say like, hey, we’d love you to do this thing. And I will read it, and I’ll say I don’t want to do this. And so how do you answer back in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a jerk saying like that’s a stupid movie, I don’t want to make it, but also doesn’t leave you on the hook for trying to write this movie for these people?

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a couple of reasons why you’re not going to want to do something. You either think it’s dumb or just not your thing, or you think this isn’t, it’s just not something that I want to do or that I think I could add something great to or that I could succeed with. What you want to do is always turn down things with that second reason, [laughs] even if they’re not always that second reason.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly.

**Craig:** Nobody minds if you say, listen, this is very cool, it’s not quite — I’m not quite sure what I could bring to it or it’s not quite what I’m looking for right now. John Lee Hancock has a great phrase, “This isn’t a pitch I can hit.”

**John:** Ah, nice.

**Craig:** You know, like so I’m putting it on me. I will often say, you know, it’s probably not something that I think I could succeed with, but I look forward to being embarrassed when this thing wins an Oscar for somebody else.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So, you know, I try and be humble about it. I mean, people are offering you things, you should be polite. But, you know, they’re not unaccustomed to this.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Just as we are not unaccustomed to hearing no.

**John:** And that’s absolutely true. And so, often what I will say is truthfully I am too busy, so like, maybe I’m just not actually available to do it, and that could be a completely valid way to get out of something. The danger is sometimes they can come back to you with that same thing when it becomes clear that you are more available. Or they’ll say, we’ll wait. I’m like oh god, now I actually have to explain why I really don’t want to do it.

The other thing that I will say, which is often true, is that someone will come to me with a project and I’ll say, you know what, this is actually kind of like something I already planned to do myself. And so I sort of have my own version of what this kind of thing is, and yours is going to be great, but I sort of want to do mine at a certain point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s another way to approach it. So from you, as a writer-director, Matt, I would say, always say thank you. Make it clear that you really did really look at it, that you’re not just dismissing it out of hand, that you don’t want to work for those people. Just say like I didn’t spark to it. It didn’t feel like it was my thing, but I’m excited to work with you in the future. And if you mean that, then they will come back to you with more stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, something that I will often do is I’ll say, after I’ve said no, I’ll say by the way, I really like this. For this part, think about this. I’m just saying like here’s just some thoughts in general. It doesn’t cost me anything and it shows that I wasn’t just being a jerk.

**John:** Exactly. And you may actually have a suggestion of like a person who is the right person for it. And so that’s always a good thing, too, if you can get someone else who would be fantastic for it involved.

**Craig:** Great point, great point.

**John:** Jay writes, “Can you go over the correct format for writing different scenes in the same room? For example, a bar where protagonists split up and do battle separately but in the same room. Do I still separate each scene with slug lines? If so, how should it look since they’re in the same master scene location? If not, can you give an example to how you would phrase this?”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I personally wouldn’t do separate slug lines here. The slug line ultimately is a tool for the production to know where they’re shooting this thing. And if it’s all in one room, they’re shooting it all in one room.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you can do is, say something like OVER BY THE BAR, you know, in all caps, and then write some of that and then say OVER BY THE ENTRANCE and then some of that, you know, so that people will understand that the camera is picking off two different areas of the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So what Craig is describing is often called the intermediary slug line. So it’s not an EXT/INT. And you’re not changing going from a new, it’s not a new scene, it’s just like a new part of where you are at in a scene.

And you’ll see that a lot. And as you read more scripts, especially action things, you’ll see that happens a lot, when you’re in sort of the same general space but there’s sort of scene-lets happening. There’s moments happening over here, and there’s moments happening over here, and sometimes characters — you need to make it clear that characters are not in the same space and can’t interact, because they’re in different parts of an environment. That’s totally fine.

I would say, in general, as I read scripts from newer screenwriters, they tend to throw in too many slug lines and make things seem like there’s too many scenes. And a lot of like “same, continuous” they get so freaked out by the format, and sort of like moving through a house takes like three pages because there’s so many slug line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not how it really works in the real world. If you’re in a house and the character is moving through space, let them move through space and don’t worry about each little new location.

**Craig:** Well, it’s just in part it’s the toxic impact of all these know nothing scripted advisers and so forth who fetishize the rules and put the fear of god into these poor people that their script is going to be thrown out if a slug line is misused. It’s absolute nonsense. The screenplay is there to inspire a movie in the reader’s mind and that’s what you should be aiming for. Don’t panic over things like “this is the way the slug line has to be!”

**John:** Yeah. Or that it should say “same” rather than “continuous.” It’s like no, it doesn’t need to be either of that. You probably don’t even need the slug line.

**Craig:** It’s just crazy.

**John:** In general I’d say like save those scene headers. Let’s really call them scene headers because it’s a header for a scene. The movie has moved to a new place and time in general and if you really haven’t moved to a new place and time but you’ve just like moved to a slightly different part of the room, just keep going and just let us be in that place.

**Craig:** I mean, there are times when you need a different slug because it’s the same time but you have two people in the bar and then at the same time behind the bar outside two guys are climbing in through the rear window.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, people need to know, okay, it’s a cheat to not kind of call out that you’ve made a big location change, because again, it’s really, it’s for the production. I mean, that’s what it’s there for. Frankly, readers tend to glide through these scene headers. It’s not the stuff that our eyeballs snag on, so.

**John:** I think, honestly, I doubt, most times as a reader I’m not really reading those, I’m just aware that there was and INT and EXT and it was all upper case and so therefore, okay, I’m in a new scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s a sort of piece of visual punctuation that lets me know that, okay, I’m in someplace new, and I’m going to figure it out once I start reading it.

**Craig:** Precisely. All right. Well, we’ve got a question here from Jim from Durham, North Carolina. And he writes, “My question concerns use of paragraph breaks in a block of dialogue.” All right, we’re in the format session of our Q&A?

**John:** We are.

**Craig:** “Admittedly, in most scenes, there’s a lot of back and forth, so it’s not common that a character goes on for half a page, but it can happen. My natural instinct when writing a long speech like that is to use normal paragraph breaks, a blank line. However, I was chastised for doing this. In fact, I was told by a person who seems to know all the rules that I had to put, in parentheses, beat, between each paragraph. I didn’t really intend for a pause any longer than the normal speaking pace, I was just trying to make it more readable and less run-on. ”

Well, there wasn’t a specific question there but I think that the implied question is who’s right? [laughs]

**John:** Who’s right? Can you put that blank line in a long speech?

**Craig:** Yeah. What do you say?

**John:** I think you can. But I would agree with whoever said that it’s not standard and that it does sort of throw you because we’re not used to seeing it. And if I were to encounter that in a script I might wonder is this a mistake, did something get dropped out, is there something wrong, because I’m used to seeing a continuous block of dialogue being a continuous block. And if it’s broken up by anything, it’s broken up by beat or something else.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, the problem isn’t that you’re putting the break in there, the problem is that the reader might presume that something went wrong and obviously that’s not what you intend. Beat is a perfectly good way to break these things up. Most people don’t read beat as long pause. If I want a long pause I’ll write in “long pause.”

However, I have to also say, if you don’t intend for any pauses or anything and it’s a half a page of a speech, try it without the pauses. I mean, just write the half a page. I’ll tell you this much, if it’s a half a page speech, better be a damn good speech. But if it’s a damn good speech, I’ll read it.

**John:** And you have other options rather than just beat and for that parenthetical. And there may be some good reason why there’s sort of a special moment of action or emphasis that it makes sense, like sort of like in the parenthetical, you might say like, you know, (to Jim) or like (straight down the barrel), or like some kind of a color line that you’re putting in that parenthetical that actually helps make the speech make more sense, and it’s also visually breaking it up. I think Jim’s overall instincts, like oh my god, this is going to be a very long block of dialogue if I don’t break it up, that’s the right instinct.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** I would just that overall a use of a parenthetical or honestly just breaking out in speech to put it in a line of scene description and then going back into the dialogue is generally a better approach.

**Craig:** I agree, I agree. It’s a good instinct to break it up unless you’ve got something that really works best as a kind of spat-out run-on deal.

**John:** Yeah. So Clarence, from Canada, asks a marathon question.

**Craig:** [laughs] This needed to be broken up by beats.

**John:** Yes. So it’s in little bullet points in WorkFlowy here. So I’m going to read this and it’s going to be kind of long, but I think it’s interesting, so I’m going to get into this here.

“Two years ago, I wrote, directed, produced my second feature film with a meager budget of $7,000. It was solely financed by me and my own production company. I had screened it at a film festival in Los Angeles and was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Before arriving in Los Angeles, I got in touch with a handful of sales agents that the festival announced would be in attendance.

“I met with those three who were interested in representing the movie for international and domestic distribution. Two wanted to make changes to the cut, so I went with the one that didn’t.”

**Craig:** Act one.

**John:** “The deal was this. The company would own the distribution rights for my movie forever and ever. And they would work hard to sell the movie to territories worldwide because otherwise they wouldn’t make any money either. They had a number of other movies under their belt that range in size from no budget like mine, to about the $1 million range.”

**Craig:** Midpoint.

**John:** “Since its initial release on VOD and DVD in North America last year, it has also been released in 30 countries. But here’s the thing, I haven’t made that much money. It’s not necessarily the number that bothers me, it’s still a huge return on a $7,000 investment. What bothers me is that my sales agent has made much more than I have, about a 60/40 split. They take a 22% commission right off the top of each sale, and they recoup $20,000 they invested into marketing, like poster design, travel to film markets, et cetera. What’s left is mine. Unless the film reaches $100,000 in sales, then they recoup $15,000 additional marketing expenses. The movie has pushed past the $100,000 mark, and most markets have now been sold, giving a little room for much more income to trickle my way.”

**Craig:** Denouement.

**John:** “So finally, my question, is it normal for a sales agent or potentially distributor to make more money than the production company that actually made the movie? Not to mention put up the cash in the first place? Is this just the cost of doing business?”

**Craig:** Okay, so let’s summarize this Cecil B. DeMille production of a question. So he’s made a micro budget movie for $7,000. He has some sales agents that have sold it on VOD and DVD, and basically he’s not getting as much money back from the sales as they are.

The movie has grossed, I think is what he means, pushed past gross $100,000. There’s not much more that he thinks is coming towards him. So while he’s made some money here, it’s not what he was hoping.

Yes, this is normal. And here’s the problem. When you’re in this micro budget business, and you’re having an independent sales agent going out there and slinging this thing around, you are essentially, it’s like the pink sheets in the stock market. You’re penny-stocking it, you know?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And so there’s this enormous built-in risk to these things. Some of these deals, the fact that the movie cost you $7,000 doesn’t mean anything to them. What they’re worried about is that they have to spend in this case, $20,000 to actually market and distribute this thing.

That $20,000 is at enormous risk. So the only way for them to make money is to build in the failures into the successes. And unfortunately, you’re not just paying them for what they did for your movie, you’re paying them for what they did for other movies that lost everything.

**John:** Yes. They’re sort of building a slate after the fact. They’re gathering up a bunch of movies. And in some ways it reminds me of sort of like the housing crisis where they packaged up a bunch of mortgages, and like put them into different bins and sort of like, you know, marketed them as one thing.

They probably were able to cut deals with VOD places and other stuff for like a whole big bundle of things. And yours was one of those bundle of things. And I think it’s unlikely that you’re going to see a huge windfall from that sort of situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Here’s the good news for Clarence though, like he made a $7,000 movie which got released on VOD and DVD. That is full of win.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think you have to take that as a victory. And the fact that your movie exists in the universe, is a really good thing especially if you like your movie. That’s a really good thing. Many, many filmmakers, Lena Dunham’s first films never had that kind of release, so you’re ahead of her from that perspective.

I wouldn’t stress out about this. I would kind of forget about this movie, this distributor. Work on your next thing, and then if you have a thing that has multiple people who want to distribute it, take a stronger look at sort of what those terms are and if there’s a possibility for better terms with a better person, maybe that will be the case.

**Craig:** Yes. Michael Eisner once famously said of negotiating for deals, “You can get what you can get.” And this is what you’re able to get.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So when you roll with these kinds of guys that are doing these high risk investments, yes, this is the way it works. There’s just no way around it. But John is absolutely right, the victory here is that you made the movie, people saw it, now it’s time to trade up and see if you can get into business with some people that aren’t necessarily in the, what my grandmother would call the schmatta business. John, that’s Yiddish for low quality clothing.

**John:** Ah-ha, I learned something today.

**Craig:** You learned something. Patrick in good old Blighty writes, “If I’m a British writer, writing a US-based script, most likely targeting a US production company or agent, should I be taking measures to alter my language and spelling accordingly? Hopefully, the dialogue should read as authentic to the setting. But should I be writing mom and not mum even if it’s against my nature? Would this freak an American reader out? Or would be people be able to accept the British-isms if it’s not affecting the story?

“I want to be able to write the script the way I feel comfortable. And I would feel as if I’m being inauthentic or misrepresenting myself as a writer by trying to remove or hide part of my identity from it, but I’m also worried at the same time it will be jarring, or take people out of the script. So what do you think I should do?”

**John:** You should absolutely not write mum instead of mom particularly in dialogue. Anything a character says needs to be written in the way that the character would actually say it. I mean, not going crazy into sort of like regionalisms or colloquialisms or trying to describe specific dialects accurately, but you don’t say mum instead of mom if it’s an American kid. That’s just not going to be natural. I wouldn’t worry about sort of every last little spelling. That’s fine. If it’s spelling in scene description, that’s going to be fine, but the big words, the words that are actually going to be said, those have to be American words if this is going to be a US production.

**Craig:** 100%. This is a slam dunk answer here. It’s not you, you’re not saying these things. You’re writing a screenplay with American characters, they have to speak as American people would speak. I’m on my second script in a row that is primarily populated by British characters. They speak like British people. What I don’t do is, for instance, if it’s a word that has a different spelling but the same pronunciation, I don’t go that far.

**John:** So honor, color, valor.

**Craig:** Precisely. If someone is going to say color, I just write it C-O-L-O-R. But I certainly, I take very careful, pay very careful attention to not use words that they simply don’t use over there. I mean, specifically if it’s in dialogue. For instance, in Britain, dumpsters aren’t called dumpsters. So I’m not going to have a character say dumpster. I’m not going to have an English character say dumpster.

This is an easy one, Patrick. Go ahead and write them however you want when people aren’t talking, but when the characters are talking, they have to talk like the people that they are.

**John:** Yes. John in Orlando writes, “I’m an attorney and screenwriter who is in Florida. I have a good friend who happens to be childhood best friends with a major showrunner you both surely know.

Oh, now I have to think of who this could be.

“We have hung out in social situations, but I’ve never revealed that I write scripts. I really hate to be ‘that guy,'” in quotes, “lest it change the social dynamic between the three of us, but I would like to at least pick his brain about some things. My dream would be to have a project gain traction first, and then mention it, but I feel this guy probably knows a ton that could help me at this point. Any advice for broaching this subject? This must happen to you with friends of friends who want advice.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it does happen with friends of friends who want advice. I think what nobody wants to hear is read my script because they already have scripts they have to read. There’s legal issues with reading a script, and so on and so forth, and of course, what’s hanging over it more than anything, is that they don’t want to be in that terrible position of having to tell you that your script is atrocious.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** However, I don’t think it’s a problem if you’ve hung out with this guy in social situations and you live near him to say, “Hey, can I just buy you a drink or a cup of coffee, an hour of your time, no more, no less? I just want to ask you some questions.”

That’s an easy one for somebody to say yes to. Frankly, it’s also an easy one for somebody to say no to. If they say no, then you just let them off the hook and that’s the end of that. But if they say yes, at least then you get them there. And if your concept comes up in the discussion and they get really excited by it, then they’ll ask you if they want to read it.

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think broaching it in a way that is sort of both direct but also not sort of confrontational, so like putting it in the context of like coffee or a drink is going to make things probably feel a little bit better. I’d be leery about having like someone else sort of broach the topic like having the wife call the wife or any of that stuff. That’s going to just be a mess. If there’s a friend of a friend and you are friends with this person, and it hasn’t come up yet, but it could come up, let that come up.

If it’s a situation which like you’re going to the Austin Film Festival and that comes up naturally in conversation, then clearly you are a screenwriter and they will know that you’re a screenwriter and that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah, easy. All right. Here’s our last question, I think. Jawaad from Fort Lauderdale writes, “My question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped underground in a box.”

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** No, I misread that, “About being trapped in one genre.” Sorry. I misread that word. [laughs]

“So my question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped in one genre. So far, I’ve been a comedy writer, I’m the head writer of my university’s sketch comedy show, done quite a bit of improv. However, lately I’m starting to realize that I may not love comedy as much as I initially thought. I realize with comedic features,” and he says here, “I just finished my first feature, a kids’ comedy and it’s definitely not as funny as it should be.”

All right. “There is a high expectation of laughs per minute and I’m not sure that’s the type of writing I ultimately want to be doing. Do you think there is an easy crossover for somebody who’s only done comedy to start writing dramas? I feel like sprinkling a little comedy into dramas would be an asset that would make my writing stand out.” John, what do you think?

**John:** So Jawaad is in college. He’s written one script and he’s worried about being pigeonholed.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

**John:** That’s actually crazy. And so, I put this question on here because I love it because it’s that sense of like I worry I’m going to be trapped in a genre having written one thing and being in a comedy troupe in college. That’s not how it works. If you had like a hit sitcom that ran for five years, then yes, you might be pigeonholed as a comedy person.

But you are at the start of your life. You can literally do anything. And so you should go off and write the drama if you think you’re a drama person. You are not trapped at all. The sense of being trapped is completely an illusion.

**Craig:** Yes. If a tree is pigeonholed in the forest and no one’s there to read it. Yeah, no, Jawaad, you are pre-pigeonhole, my friend. Nobody knows what you’ve written here, and it doesn’t matter. Your gut is telling you something, however, that is important and that’s you don’t want to write a certain kind of movie. You don’t want to write broad comedy, and you may not want to write comedy at all.

The fact that you maybe identify as a funny person or that you like writing sketch comedy, so you like writing comedy in sketch format as opposed to feature format, that doesn’t mean that that’s all you can be or all you should be. You should write the kind of movie you want to write. That’s really the only sort of movie that you are ever going to have success with anyway.

Sprinkling a little comedy into dramas is a good thing if that’s what the movie wants to have. I would not think in terms of assets. There’s a lot of calculation inherent to this question that I would advise you abandon.

**John:** Exactly. It’s always like, it’s trying to figure out like, well, what if I build this mansion and I don’t like the bathroom in this mansion that I build. It’s like, well, you don’t have a mansion yet, so like, stop building your mansion and actually like, you know, go to work. It’s one of those sort of like, what if I don’t —

**Craig:** It’s a Steve Martin joke. You know, how to not pay taxes on $1 million, step one, get $1 million. You’re not there. This is not something you should be worrying about. You have all the ability and time to write precisely what you want in the manner you want to write it.

**John:** I agree. Craig, it is time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** One Cool Things.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is so short. It’s Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns. It’s a documentary by Joe Callander. It is 1 minute and 47 seconds long. So I shouldn’t say too much about it because I could actually talk longer than the actual documentary is. But it’s just a perfect little gem that I just love. And it reminds me of like an Errol Morris film, but it’s 1:47. I loved it.

**Craig:** You had me at 1:47. I’ll be watching it as soon as we’re done recording. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned too many Too Many Cooks by Chris “Casper” Kelly. So Chris Kelly, who goes by Casper Kelly because there are four billion Chris Kellys out there, he’s done a lot of shows on Adult Swim which is the Cartoon Network, I believe. And he did this thing that may be the greatest thing actually that anyone has ever done in an Internety way. This is the best of the Internet. If Alex from Target is the sort of most pointless of the Internet, this is the greatest.

Adult Swim has this thing where they do these infomercials which aren’t infomercials at all, but they fill in an 11 minute gap at 4am.

And so he floated this thing out there and lo and behold, a few days later, it is a sensation. And it truly is a sensation. We talked about subversion. The concept is a simple comic concept. We’re watching the opening credit sequence of what is sort of like a Full House sitcom. And the gag is that the song is super cheesy and everybody in it turns and looks at the camera and smiles when their name appears underneath them.

And you think, okay. And then the joke becomes, oh, there’s actually way more characters than there should be on the show like there’s like way too many characters and you think, okay, that’s a joke. But every 40 seconds, Chris Kelly says, “No, that’s not the joke. This is the joke.” And then, about seven minutes in, it’s not a joke anymore at all.

It’s actually something brilliant, and subversive and kind of existentially gorgeous. And where it ends is quite beautiful actually. Smarf, that’s all I say is Smarf.

**John:** Smarf. I’m going to watch it again because I’m not sure I got to the moment of existential beauty. I got to a moment of just tremendous appreciation for sort of just the ongoing genius of it. And to me, where it crossed over is there’s a moment where a young woman is hiding in the closet, and it’s one of the most sort of bizarrely brilliant little ideas. So I just loved it.

**Craig:** I think my mind went into a Nirvana space when the names rearranged themselves as people, and the people appeared as the names. That’s when I just thought Chris “Casper” Kelly, and really, I’ll just say this, why I love it so much is that this is truly a marriage of chaos and discipline.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We typically just get chaos on the Internet. It’s easy to be weird on the Internet. Super easy, and there’s lots of it. But this was absolute madness within a structure that was so good. So anyway, it’s out there, by the time this airs it’ll probably be, everybody will be like, oh, we all know about Too Many Cooks, but if you don’t, my god, Too Many Cooks.

**John:** Check it out. So we will have a link to that in the show notes, and also there’s a piece I read in Entertainment Weekly this morning about an interview with him talking about sort of why he did what he did and how he did it. It was just remarkable.

You’ll find links to that in the show notes in addition to other things we talked about. You can find those at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you want to subscribe to Scriptnotes, you can join us on iTunes, and click subscribe there, you can also leave us a comment which is always lovely and helps us out.

If you want to listen to the back episodes, and also the special bonus episodes, we’ll have special things with the Three Page Challenge from Austin. We’ll have Simon Kinberg. Those are found at scriptnotes.net and you could subscribe there. It’s $1.99 a month, it gives you access to the whole back catalogue.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** $1.99. Craig, we are super, super close to the 1,000 full-time premium subscribers, so we’re going to have to do that dirty episode and I’m so excited to do it.

**Craig:** You said you had a great idea. Do you want to say what it is?

**John:** I don’t because I’ve not reached out to that person yet.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Yes, but it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I trust you.

**John:** Well, I told you who the person was, right?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I did. Craig, your memory is failing. It’s a person who, I’ll tell you again after the show. But you said, I told you after the last show, you said oh my god, that’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** Yes. Wow, Craig. I’m sorry, maybe you should like have a medical professional because last week you asked about the whole Retina iMac and the display —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You said like you wanted to get the Retina display but without the iMac and I explained why. And I explained that I’d done it before.

**Craig:** Let me put your mind at ease. I have a 13-year old son. He’s destroying my mind. [laughs] It’s just him. It’s not medical. It’s just my son.

**John:** It’s not medical.

**Craig:** No, he’s just consuming me. He’s consuming my mind because I have to remember all of my stuff and all of his stuff.

**John:** Yes, it’s a burden.

**Craig:** Yes, huge burden.

**John:** If you would like to jog Craig’s memory, you can reach him @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. If you have a long question like the ones we answered today, you can write it to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack, you can just go to writeremergency.com, that’s a link to the Kickstarter. There will also be a link in the show notes. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week, who also has a Kickstarter project, so back that.

Stuart Friedel is out sick today. He will be back next week.

**Craig:** Good, good. [laughs]

**John:** How do you dare say that?

**Craig:** I hope it’s fatal. [laughs]

**John:** Craig gets very mean late in the episode. This is the one where everyone turns again Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Exactly, I don’t know why. I think this is my new theme is that Stuart is bad.

**John:** Stuart is all things good.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Stuart. But it’s, what if he’s dying?

**John:** Well, it could be Ebola.

**Craig:** Oh, sweet.

**John:** All my staff went and got their flu shots because the flu sucks and it’s much more likely that you’re going to have the flu than to get Ebola.

**Craig:** Slightly more likely, yes.

**John:** Just a little —

**Craig:** Just a touch.

**John:** Just a tiny bit, but I learned that everyone who works for me is afraid of needles.

**Craig:** Oh, what a bunch of babies.

**John:** I know. [laughs] Like it’s very rare that I run around with a needle and stab them.

**Craig:** Like what a bunch of, first of all, the flu shot, you don’t even feel that needle. It’s the tiniest, skinniest needle.

**John:** I know. And it’s so rare that I stab them. And for them to have this sort of, you know, instinctive reaction just because I’m running around with a needle is weird. [laughs]

**Craig:** Honestly, it’s so bizarre. Wait, you gave them flu shots?

**John:** Well yes. It kind of saves them money.

**Craig:** I like that you sit them down and just start injecting. No wonder Stuart is sick. It’s your latest concoction over there at Quote-Unquote.

**John:** I told them it was the flu serum.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s not Stuart.

**John:** You’ll never know.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s not.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

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* Big Fish: The Musical is now playing [at Musical Theatre West in Long Beach](http://www.musical.org/MusicalTheatreWest/bigfish2014.html)
* [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com) is going strong [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [The Five Types of Twist Endings](http://alecworley.weebly.com/blog/the-five-types-of-twist-ending) by Alec Worley
* [Alex from Target](http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/11/alex-from-target-fame.html)
* [Darius Kazemi’s XOXO talk](http://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/every-artists-how-i-made-i.html)
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
* Screenwriting.io on [intermediary slugs](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-slug/)
* [Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrjhtbQlOQ) by Joe Callander
* [Too Many Cooks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8) by Casper Kelly, and [his interview in Entertainment Weekly](http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/11/07/adult-swim-too-many-cooks/)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/descending-into-darkness).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Uh….my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 169 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s been far too long.

**Craig:** Been far too long.

**John:** You were not around last week. You were doing something else, so I had to do a podcast without you. I survived, but it’s good to have you back.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. I was at the wedding of excellent screenwriter Ted Griffin and remarkable Broadway performer and film and television performer, Sutton Foster. It was a beautiful wedding. Had a great time. But I did miss you. I missed Austin. I mean, I haven’t missed Austin in years. So, that was a bummer.

And then I wasn’t there to do the show. And that was a bummer. But I did listen to it. The first podcast I’ve ever listened to in my life. And it was good. Everybody did a really good job.

**John:** Yeah. We had Susannah Grant stepped in and was the co-host in your absence. One thing that may not be completely clear to people who are listening to that episode is so we’re in this church, but the actual layout of where we were was incredibly awkward. So, a church has pews, which is lovely, and then there’s like two steps up and it gets to where actual services happen. And the steps are very important because that’s why you can actually see what’s happening.

But they had us set up in front of those steps, down at the same level as the pews, so sight lines were actually awful. In many ways listening to the podcast would be a lot like attending the podcast because it was very hard to see anything while you were there.

**Craig:** I did notice on the schedule that they had you in that church. And I confess that I thought to myself, oh, John is going to throw a fit. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because why did they put you in a church? Why weren’t you in the regular room?

**John:** Because it was one of the biggest available rooms. The biggest room at the Driskill was actually bigger than this would have been, but this was what was big and available at the time. So, once again, I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us there at all. It was a great experience. We had great guests. It was super fun.

We also did a Three Page Challenge with people who were in the second round of scripts for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Oh, terrific.

**John:** And that was really cool, too.. So, a few weeks from now we’ll have the audio up for that. We had Franklin Leonard and Ilyse McKimmie as the guests for that. And they were so insightful, because these are people who read scripts all the time. They’re sort of gatekeepers. And their perspective on stuff was just terrific. And to be able to have the actual writers of those three pages in the room to explain sort of this is what the actual full movie is like is so useful, because we could talk about — that movie you’re describing sounds great, here’s the movie I thought I was reading based on these three pages. Let’s try to get these things a little closer together.

**Craig:** And that right there is the core of what a good relationship between a writer and a development person should be.

**John:** Absolutely. So, today we’re going to be doing a new batch of Three Page Challenges. We have three new scripts to look at, so that will be cool. And they’re actually really interesting scripts, so I’m eager to get into them.

But we have so much follow up. We could do a whole episode with just the follow up stuff. So, let’s burn through this stuff first.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I’ve set it up in two previous podcasts, there’s this thing we’re working on called Writer Emergency, and it is a deck of cards for when you are writing something and your story just gets stuck. And it’s the kind of thing where — Aline mentioned this on an earlier episode — where sometimes just someone needs to give you a nudge, an idea, saying like what if this. And sometimes everything just breaks open, like oh, I suddenly get how to do that.

You don’t always have that person to give you that idea. And these cards are just full of those ideas. So, you saw these. I sent you a deck of these cards.

**Craig:** Yes. I saw an early version and they’re adorable.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** And they’re full of very cool little exercises and exercises are good things. I mean, they get you — it’s kind of like the text version of writing in a different place. It just jostles you out of your normal which is always a good thing.

It’s funny. On Twitter when you had mentioned that you were going to be bringing something like this but you were being intentionally vague, a whole bunch of people thought that you were about to launch some sort of pay me for notes service. And I just thought that was hysterical.

**John:** That will never happen.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** Ever.

**Craig:** Ever! No, but this is a great little deck of cards. And it seems like if I made a list of gifts you could get for your writer friend, it would be — I don’t know, what do you get writers?

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard to get things for a writer. So you get them like pens or backpacks.

**Craig:** Or Advil. I mean, we don’t need anything. But this is a fun stocking stuffer. I think you’ve timed it well for Christmas.

**John:** Yes. So, we cannot actually guarantee Christmas delivery. It’s something we would love to be able to do, but we are working with suppliers who have to print these things, and we have to ship these things, so that could be complicated. But it could be possible.

The most fascinating thing I’ve learned over the past six weeks as we’ve been trying to put this thing together is that shipping physical goods is really challenging. I always make apps and things, podcasts, things you can ship out digitally. When you have to ship physical things to far away countries, it gets to be challenging.

And so we’re dealing with these suppliers that are sort of all over the world. But it’s turned out really cool.

One of the most interesting things about this whole process, and the thing that made me most nervous about my conversation with you, is how we’re actually launching these into the world. We’re using Craig’s favorite thing in the entire world. Craig, what is your favorite thing in the entire world?

**Craig:** Uh, well, my number one favorite thing is death by anthrax. And then my second favorite thing is Kickstarter.

**John:** Yes. And we had a whole episode about your love of Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Love it!

**John:** You love it to death. And so I was really nervous when I sent these to you and said, and Craig, we actually went through a lot of different ways, and the best way for us to make these is actually to do a Kickstarter campaign. And you said…?

**Craig:** What was the lie I told you? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That it was okay? Did I say it was okay? It’s okay.

**John:** I think you said it was okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay because you are essentially using them like a store. You’re saying, look, you buy this and we’ll give it to you. You’re making them. It’s not like you’re saying we might one day make these.

**John:** It’s not like you’re investing in something that we are getting all the profits from. The goal behind this is, so, every deck of these cards that we give away through Kickstarter, we’re also giving a deck to a kid’s writing program. Because these things are actually really great for learning about story and how you would talk about story. And so we’ve been doing exercises with kids to figure out what actually works and these cards work really well.

But Kickstarter is a good way for us to be able to make a bunch of these at once. And when you make physical goods, the more you can print at once, the cheaper each unit becomes. That whole like curve of economics thing, it actually kind of works when you’re dealing with physical goods. So, we have to make enough so we can actually print enough so that it’s actually worthwhile to do. So, that’s the goal behind doing the Kickstarter of it all.

**Craig:** Look, I make an exception for you. What can I say?

**John:** Ah, thank you. It means a lot that Craig is not angry at this Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Can I just say as an aside…?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is kind of sad that my podcast character, I mean, Mike Birbiglia called me the antagonist of Scriptnotes and it made me laugh. But, you know, Lindsay Doran, she’s been doing this independent producers thing lately where she goes and talks to independent producers about, I don’t know, producing stuff. I guess it’s like Sundance Labs for independent film producers.

And somebody brought up that she was working with me and they had heard this on the podcast. And they’re like, is he okay? Is he mean? [laughs] Do I yell? And she just started laughing because I’m actually — I’m very nice.

**John:** You’re actually very, very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t yell. I’m not a jerk.

**John:** No. Maybe three times in our entire relationship have you been sort of really, really angry. And they’ve never been directed at me, because I would never want to be the focus of that rage. But I was actually genuinely concerned, because I know you have deeply held feelings about Kickstarter, and so I actually approached this Kickstarter thinking like how would I build something that Craig wouldn’t hate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s really how I go through my life is how do I do things that Craig can possible stand. So, we designed the pledge tiers at levels where like no matter what you’re doing, you’re getting the thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I mean, look, you’re delivering the product, so you’re not asking people to give you a bunch of money so you can go buy a bunch of lunches for yourself for a year and then not deliver. And, also, you’re donating these to charity. I mean, it’s just — it’s the best possible version of this. So, how could I — by the way, it’s the same thing that Franklin Leonard said when he called me about the Black List.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** He was like, I really was just thinking how can I get you to not hate this. [laughs]

**John:** I was asking myself what would Franklin do, and how can I get Craig not to hate this?

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** You were the two standard bearers for me. Aline factors in there, too, so I actually showed these to Aline right away. And significant changes were made based on Aline’s feedback.

**Craig:** She’s tough. She’s tough.

**John:** She’s tough. So, if you are interested in seeing these decks of cards and perhaps getting one, the Kickstarter campaign will probably be up the morning that this podcast comes out. If I don’t have the URL tweeted, you can just go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to the Kickstarter campaign. It’s a super short campaign. It’s like two weeks or so. So, you don’t have a lot of time to dilly and dally, but the people who listen to this podcast, they’re on it, they’re buying t-shirts during limited windows.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re good.

**John:** It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** We have the best listeners.

**John:** Well, we do have the best listeners. And I met so many of them at Austin. It was really nice.

**Craig:** What a lovely thing.

**John:** At Austin I always see Scriptnotes t-shirts, which is great. And now that there’s multiple generations of Scriptnotes t-shirts, I see the different eras, the different colors, the different everything. But I saw one of the very few shirts we ended up selling that was sort of Frankenweenie inspired. It was a quote from my Frankenweenie script. And they want what science gives them, but not the questions science asks.

And someone was wearing that shirt. And it was just so nice to see, like, aw. That one shirt.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know. Is that a Scriptnotes shirt?

**John:** We sold it through the same store. We sold it through the same johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Well, I will, for all of our listeners who do attend Austin and those who are thinking about attending, I will absolutely be back next year for sure. No one else is getting married that I care about.

**John:** Absolutely. And you will be at our next live show. And on the next podcast we will be able to announce the dates and possibly even the guests for that. And that’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Good one. It’s going to be a big one.

**John:** Cool. Further follow up. Last episode that you and I were talking, I got a new computer and it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s the 5K Retina iMac.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I would encourage — if people are on the fence like, oh, will it really make a difference, it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been reading some reviews. People are just tripping all over how awesome it looks. I’m waiting now for the Retina Cinema display, because it doesn’t exist yet, but I have to assume it’s on the way, right?

**John:** We talked about this last week. It’s actually incredibly hard to build that because there’s not a cable fast enough to get the —

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. We did.

**John:** So you may be waiting awhile.

**Craig:** I’m like your grandpa that just now he’s repeating stuff. [laughs] That’s just sad.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s just sad. Someone tuck me in. Tuck me in and give me soup.

**John:** The podcast, we’ll forgive you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m old.

**John:** Last podcast we also talked about the Marvel superheroes. We talked about all the superheroes and that there were 31 superhero movies coming out.

**Craig:** And now we know who they all are, right?

**John:** We do. So, the published the list with actual names for those dates. Because I had kind of mocked Marvel for like saying, oh, these are Untitled Marvel movie in this slot. And it’s like well that’s cheating. But they decided to stop — because of me — they decided they had to actually decide what movies they were going to make.

**Craig:** You are at the hub of our industry. You are the beating heart.

**John:** The same way that I look to you and Franklin Leonard, Kevin Feige says, “What does John August think?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He probably wakes up in the middle of the night going, oh my god, what does John August think?

**Craig:** They call you the Eye. The Great Eye.

**John:** We’ve talked about Kevin Feige a lot and I realized that I actually met him a zillion years ago because on the very first Iron Man I came in and did just this tiny, tiny bit of work on it. And even back then I predicted success.

**Craig:** I also met him many, many years ago. He was super nice. I remember he was super duper nice. It was a general meeting and I remember he gave me his card. It was like a Marvel card.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now look at him. Now look, our boy is all grown up. Yeah.

**John:** Exactly. So, the movies are Captain America: Civil War, which was predicted. Doctor Strange, which was sort of predicted, but it had been un-slated. Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther. Okay, sure. Captain Marvel, which just makes things incredibly complicated.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Idea wise, because Captain Marvel is the original name of Shazam and they’re also making a Shazam movie, but Shazam is DC and it’s confusing. But Captain Marvel is a female superhero with sort of — she does superhero-y things. So, that could be good.

**Craig:** You struggled through that a little bit, I think. You were like, “Who does…” You wanted to say female superhero-y things, didn’t you?

**John:** No, no, I was trying to say that she did Superman kind of things, but I perceive her as having flight and strength and stuff, but I don’t actually know the details and limits of her powers. I will confess my ignorance to that.

**Craig:** I’m right there with you. Honestly. Like for instance, I know that Black Panther is black. I don’t actually know what his — I’m kind of reaching the edge of my comics knowledge. So, I don’t know actually what his powers are, or Captain Marvel. I mean, I know Doctor Strange. Who else? Oh, yeah, Thor.

**John:** Thor.

**Craig:** I know Thor. He’s got a hammer.

**John:** He’s got a hammer. And we know that his evil brother is —

**Craig:** Loki. And his dad is Odin.

**John:** Yeah. But his dad is dead.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, yeah, forgot.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers is a two-part thing, which of course, why wouldn’t it be a two-part thing?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the Infinity War. And so that deals with a lot of stuff that’s been set up in the universe so far. All those infinity stones and it’s been through all the different —

**Craig:** I don’t know, the infinity stones, I don’t know about those. I’ve never followed that story. I know that they’re there and they have something to do from Guardians of the Galaxy, but I feel like I’m totally — like obviously I didn’t know anybody from Guardians of the Galaxy. I honestly didn’t know about Hawkeye. [laughs] I just didn’t. There’s so many of them. I just don’t know.

**John:** But I think your life was pretty fulfilling even not knowing that. So, when you do know it, it’ll just be an extra plus.

**Craig:** I think there should be a team, like Guardians of the Galaxy was a team of people that theoretically most people didn’t know. But I think Marvel should make a movie of characters that most people do know, I just don’t. So, it would have Hawkeye and Captain Marvel. Like Ant Man? I don’t’ know.

**John:** No idea.

**Craig:** Does he get small? I assume he gets small?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to say small.

**Craig:** Small.

**John:** And, finally, Inhumans, which is November 2, 2018, and almost nobody knows the Inhumans since they’re a completely different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know them. [laughs]

**John:** The best description I heard of what they will represent likely in the Marvel universe is because the Marvel universe for Disney does not have X-Men, and they actually apparently can’t even say the word “mutant.” Inhumans apparently do — may serve a similar function in that universe.

**Craig:** I see. Okay. Well, they can be in the movie of characters that other people know that I don’t know. Which, as we can see, is going to be an enormous movie because I’m grandpa. This is a Craig as grandpa day.

**John:** Yeah. We divide the universe into two things —

**Craig:** What I know.

**John:** Things Craig knows. Things Craig doesn’t know.

**Craig:** It could be a great movie. Everybody knows who we are, except for Craig.

**John:** Final bit of follow up, last podcast I was talking about — the podcast we did together — I was talking about how I had had this phone pitch and then I had to go in and do the real pitch and sort of what the difference was between that first impression, everything happening on the phone, and having to really dig in and figure out story.

And so that digging in and figuring out story, that went really, really well. But, I listened to a podcast that actually had a guy having to give a pitch that was so smart. It’s such a good version of this that I want to share it with people. It’s a podcast called the StartUp. And it’s Alex Bloomberg, who was a reporter from This American Life and Planet Money, and he’s attempting to start his own podcasting company. And so he’s trying to raise money for it.

And so he’s going to investors and pitching his podcast company. And pitching a company, a startup, and pitching a movie, they’re different skills. They have different terms of art and sort of ways you do things, but what was so insightful in this first episode he’s trying to pitch Chris Sacca, who is a big investor guy, on his company. And to hear it go horribly, and then hear Chris Sacca pitch that same idea back to him in ways that actually mean something to him.

And it was just a great episode to listen to. The differences between how you perceive your own idea and how someone on the other end perceives your idea and what that idea could be. It was just a fascinating version and that happens all the time in Hollywood, which is where you are describing the story you think you see, and they will sometimes describe back the story that is actually meaningful to them. And you have to decide is that even a movie I would want to write.

**Craig:** Do you watch Shark Tank at all?

**John:** I don’t. But I know what that is. That’s the thing where people have these inventions and things?

**Craig:** Yeah. They have ideas for businesses, basically. Sometimes it’s an invention. Sometimes it’s a service. And they come in and there are five people there who have a lot of money, like Mark Cuban, who is a billionaire. And the individual investors make decisions about how much they are willing to invest, if anything at all, and how much of the company they want in exchange for their investment.

And it’s based on, there was an English show that my wife and I used to watch years ago called Dragon’s Den. And it looks like they just ported it over and called it Shark Tank for the United States. Same idea. And we’ve always loved it because it is people pitching and it is them telling a story. Everything comes down to some sort of narrative.

But there is that remarkable thing that happens where somebody comes in and they are inherently likeable. They are — it’s a single mom who has fought really hard. Sometimes they’re kids. It’s a 16-year-old who’s got this brilliant idea. It’s a man who has been downsized and he’s getting back on his feet with his own thing. And there are these very likeable stories, but there’s always that moment where they hear the story, they really appreciate the story, and they show this guy some empathy and love, or this woman some empathy and love, and then the wall just drops. And it becomes business.

And they couldn’t care about that at all. It’s amazing to watch it happen. Like you see it literally flick, like a switch. And I think the same thing happens in Hollywood. We come in and we have these great opening moments and I love you, and you love me, and everything is wonderful, wouldn’t this be wonderful. And then you pitch. And then they just flip a switch. And now it’s business.

**John:** So, what’s so interesting about that situation and what happens in the room when you’re pitching a movie is you start by talking why the story is meaningful to you, but at the same time you have to be able to describe it in terms that are going to be meaningful for them in terms of what their actual decision-making process is. And so you have to be able to talk about how it’s resonating with you, your personal connection to it, who you are, why they should trust you. But at the same time you have to be able to then flip it and say like this is why this is going to be a thing that needs to happen in the world. This is why this is going to be a movie you’re going to want to make and green light and spend all your money and all your time doing.

And it’s easy to figure out why something is meaningful to you. It’s hard to figure out sometimes why it’s meaningful to them. And it’s practice is what does it. You start to hear these investors talking about sort of what’s meaningful. You start to hear the words they use. Things like what’s your unfair advantage, which I’d never actually heard before until Chris Sacca said it. And then I was an investor pitch earlier this week and a guy slipped that in. I’m like, oh my god, that felt kind douche-baggy, but also wonderful.

The same way that we would use “end of the second act.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or at the midpoint. The way we would use those kind of terms or tent pole, they use these kind of terms and you have to be able to understand why they’re looking for those things because those are meaningful parts of their decision process.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you are pitching something, it’s great to start with that question you raised. Why should this movie exist? And you need to have a good reason for it. Not a good intellectual reason, but a good passionate reason. You have to actually believe your answer, because that’s what’s going to power you through writing the script. Only through believing your answer and having faith in your answer do you have a prayer of having them agree with you.

**John:** And one of the toughest matches though is sometimes you can pitch a movie that you actually have no interest in writing. And I’ve encountered this a couple times where I’ve gone in on a project and I can sort of see like, oh, there’s a movie there. I can see what that is. I can see what they’re going for. Or, sometimes I’ll be sent some adaptation and I’ll be like I see why there is a movie there, I just know I don’t want to write it. And I know that it’s the process of trying to write this thing is going to be terrible. And that same kind of thing happens in this StartUp podcast, where there’s a version of what an investor is looking for that is not at all what Alex Bloomberg is trying to create.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And he has to question himself, like, I see why they want this thing, I’m just not interested in doing that thing. I don’t think I’d be good at doing that thing. I think everyone is going to be miserable if I try to make that thing.

**Craig:** And then you have a choice.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Because, it’s funny, when Lindsay and I went around pitching the thing that I’m writing now, we had terrific success. A lot of people said, yes, we would like this. After about three, I think our first three meetings were big successes. And then the fourth one was just terrible. Terrible meeting. Not because they were being mean, it just was awkward from the start. It was a rough one. And we knew it wasn’t going to be a yes. It was going to be a no.

And in thinking about it later, I was just so grateful that that hadn’t happened to have been the first one.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because you just don’t, sometimes it’s just that’s the one person, or even if it’s the two people, and you have to ask yourself, okay, is it me or is them? And, of course, when you’re looking for a big investor, or in our case, when you’re looking for that one investor, all it takes is one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You just need one person to love it. You don’t need everybody to kind of like it.

**John:** Exactly. And sometimes that decision process of who do you go to first can be so important because, you know, sometimes it’s good to go to sort of the softer place that you’re not that invested in them saying yes or saying no, just so you can practice what it feels like to you telling it to somebody else.

And so in times where I’ve done TV pitches, I’ve noticed that I often do schedule the most unlikely place first, or the least exciting place first, because that way you sort of get all the butterflies out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit like you’re scheduling your movie, you always try and pick something that’s kind of a layup for day one. You know, oh yeah, we’re just going to shoot two people talking in a restaurant. That’s easy. Easy first day.

**John:** I was out a dinner with Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber who wrote 500 Days of Summer.

**Craig:** Great guys.

**John:** Great guys. Love them to death. And I had met Scott before, but this was the first time meeting Michael.

**Craig:** He’s the best, isn’t he?

**John:** They’re wonderful.

**Craig:** And he’s like, and Michael is like, he’s 12 as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So young. Yeah.

**John:** So young. So, one of them lives in Los Angeles. One of them lives in New York. And so they often have to do pitches or meetings on the phone with people. And they talked about how difficult it was to plan for it. And they had to actually sort of be really meticulous about who is going to say what, because otherwise they’re just talking over each other. And they need to make sure that all the points get made. It’s really, really difficult to do in person and then to try to it on the phone, too, it’s a challenging world we live in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had lunch with — or coffee or something with Michael in New York and I was fascinated by this, how they managed to do it that way. But they do. I’ve spent time with both of them now, but never in the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So, this was my first time ever — they’re rarely together, so it was nice to have them both there at Austin.

**Craig:** I mean, but then again, look at us.

**John:** Look at us. We’re never in the same room. It works out fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re the Elton John and Bernie Taupin of podcasts.

**John:** Oh my god. I think that’s a much better comparison that the Van Halen of podcasts.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question. Which one of us is Elton John and which one is Bernie Taupin?

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin —

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** You’re the flamboyant showman.

**Craig:** I’m the one in the boa and duck glasses. Yeah.

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin because I have no idea what he looks like, but I sense he’s really the power behind the whole relationship.

**Craig:** He’s certainly the serious one. Yeah. He’s the one who’s like, okay —

**John:** He’s like, “Elton, no, got to get this done. We’ve got to finish this.” That’s completely my function. In Big Fish with Andrew Lippa, and I adore Andrew Lippa, but I always the one who had to say like, okay no, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to finish this song. We’ve got to get this thing happening because we promised these people. I’m always — that’s my job.

**Craig:** Yup. And I’m the guy in the Mozart wig and sailor outfit.

**John:** Yes. You put something on the show notes which I think is potentially fascinating, because it’s something that you’re writing right now. On the show notes you write, “Descending into darkness. When you have to write terrible, tragic moments.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually did it this morning. And I’m just going to be incredibly honest because this is the place where I’ve learned how to be honest, I think, on the podcast. I wrote this sequence this morning, and then I — honestly, I bawled. I bawled. I cried my little eyes out, because it was so sad. And it just made me so, so sad.

And if that sounds like something that you find laughable, maybe this isn’t for you. Because I do feel like this is part of what we have to do. It’s not something that’s come up frequently for me, because most of the movies that I’ve written over my career have been lighter fare. And while there are sweet moments or dramatic moments in lighter fare, it’s never quite so gut-wrenching. I mean, you just don’t want to kill — you don’t want to deflate the soufflé of lighter movies.

But when you’re writing a movie that has room for tragedy, sooner or later you’re going to come to that point where you have to go to a bad place, because you have to write something that is terrible. The sort of thing that if it happened to a friend, you’d feel it in the pit of your stomach and you would be horrified.

And it’s not easy. And I’m not sure, I sort of wanted to ask you if there’s anything you do particularly to prepare for those moments and how you go into those moments because for me it seemed like the only way to prepare was to not prepare and to just let myself experience bad things.

**John:** So, yes, I’ve had to do this actually quite a lot. And so Big Fish was sort of the most notable example, where that last sequence where you’re sort of taking Edward Bloom to the river and he passes away, that’s opening a bunch of veins. And writing that sequence, I’ve talked about this before and sort of not secret knowledge, what I would do is in my bathroom at my old house there was this big mirror and I would sit in front of the mirror and I’d bring myself to tears. And then I would start writing the scene. I would write it all by hand.

And it sounds very, very method, but in a weird way your brain switches to a different place when you’re in that kind of heightened emotion. And you can sort of capture that emotion when you are writing, sometimes when you’re feeling that same way.

And so I didn’t have to necessarily bring up horrible memories of my past. I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. But I let that moment be really real in my head to the point where it would bring me to tears, and then I would write through it.

The danger and difficulty of doing that is that same sense memory will come back every time you see or reencounter that scene. And so as I had to sort of go through the script again, and again, and again, I couldn’t get through that stuff, reading it sometimes, without evoking that same memory and those same tears.

Then, of course, I went off and did the Broadway version and to write that sequence with Andrew Lippa I had to bring us both to tears, and then we had to write the song, and then figure out the scene that goes around it and stage it and perform it ourselves like 100 times. So, that whole moment is deeply, deeply wired in to sort of how I experience the show, how I experience the movie.

And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the reality. You have to remember that you are the first performer of this moment that you are creating. And so if it doesn’t have an emotional impact for you as you’re writing it, it’s not going to have an emotional impact for someone who is watching it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in many ways while it is uncomfortable to feel these emotions as you’re writing these things and to cry over what you’re writing, it is the reward of a lot of good work that you’ve done before that. A lot of logical non-emotional work you’ve done. Because the only way you’re going to get to that place — tragedy ultimately while felt irrationally is constructed of rational things. Circumstances make things tragic. Not emotions.

And when the circumstances align in such a way, then they allow the emotion to occur. So, this is your reward. You’ve done your job. If you are crying when this happens, it means you have carefully constructed the proper recipe for tragedy. But then going through it, it’s interesting — I didn’t start crying before I did it. I just started doing it and then started feeling those moments where I would begin. And that’s how you know it’s true.

I mean, this is where I have to say drama is easier than comedy. Because when you write something funny, I don’t know anybody that sits there writing — any comic writer who sits there writing and then suddenly starts laughing as they type. I’ve never seen such a thing. It’s because it is so, I don’t know how to, I want to say intellectual.

**John:** But comedy is ultimately a function of surprise. Comedy relies on that sense of like something that you didn’t see happening happens, or someone says something that you didn’t expect, and it takes you by surprise.

**Craig:** And you know the surprise.

**John:** And once you know the surprise, it’s not going to be funny the same way. Same reason why you watch any movie that you love as a comedy, you may still love it, but it’s not going to be as funny the second time.

**Craig:** That’s right. And so you have to — the only way to write a funny moment is to know the surprise at the end and then it build it backwards like a magician designing a trick. But that’s dangerous work because there is no instinctive moment where you say my lizard brain has just informed me that this is impactful.

You know, when you cry, that’s not you. You’re not crying. The sense of who we are as people is all about our consciousness and our frontal lobe. This is the animal underneath. So, not only are you the first person performing this part, but then your limbic system is the first audience member listening to it, in a true sense different than you. And so you have to listen to that and you have to be on top of that.

And if you get to a place where you’re descending into the darkness, and none of this is happening, then you have to ask yourself if you’ve constructed all the circumstances necessary to make this moment tragic, or if you were just leaning on the moment itself. It’s not enough to watch somebody die. We have seen people die in movies 14 billion times. Why are they dying? What did they do to die? Who is watching them die? What does that person mean to them?

All of those questions are what makes something tragic as opposed to just henchman number four falling to his death.

**John:** It is your emotional investment in those characters that it makes those moments have stakes, have meaning. And so it’s not necessarily your emotional investment in a character who is dying, but it could your emotional investment in the characters who are witnessing that death who are affected by that death. That is what’s meaningful.

You’re absolutely right in that if in a movie you see a character die in a car crash, that’s not necessarily going to bring tears. It’s not necessarily going to have an emotional impact. Only to the degree that we love that character or relate to that character or see ourselves in that character, or someone else who we can identify with who we can feel that connection to the character. Then we can feel it. Otherwise, we don’t feel it.

And your point about construction of a joke is absolutely true with drama as well. And I often describe Big Fish as one very long joke and the punch line is tears. In that it really is very carefully constructed to set up this expectation of we know from the start that Edward Bloom is not going to live at the end. The question of the film and the question of the musical is what is going to happen with this relationship between Edward and his son, Will. And we are paying that off right at the very end and the surprise of the movie — I’m going to spoil everything for you — but the surprise of the movie is that Will actually finally does get there and is able to deliver that last moment.

And so it’s that happy tears thing can happen because you’ve spent so much time and so much energy making it possible to have meaning in that moment.

**Craig:** Right. Now, there is a danger hidden behind all of this. And the danger is this. You will write this and you will care deeply about it. It will be emotional for you. And sometimes it’s emotional for you because it has a resonance to you personally, separate from the story. However, you must remember that the audience, either the people in the theater or someone reading your screenplay owes you nothing.

**John:** Zero.

**Craig:** Nothing. And it is absolutely within their right to say this didn’t move me, or I think it would be better if this, or I think it would better — you don’t have to agree with them, but what you can’t do is hold them responsible for your emotions. Either you have managed to welcome them in to your limbic theater, or you haven’t. And so just be careful not to force people to be accountable for what you feel, just because you felt it.

**John:** Absolutely. And so sometimes you will encounter a script where there’s clearly supposed to be this emotional payoff and we’re not feeling it. We’re not feeling those moments. And something along the way did not click fully. And someone got off the ride. And if someone got off the ride, they’re going to see this moment and say like I should feel something, but I don’t feel something, and therefore I don’t like it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that is really going to happen. And obviously the same thing happens in comedy, too. When you feel joke-oids or things that should be funny but aren’t funny, there’s something that’s just fundamentally not working there. And it’s your job to put aside your experience of that moment to really be the scientist to figure out why is this not working the way I thought it was going to be working.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at these Three Page Challenges and see if we can get them working the way they want to be working. So, as always, if you want to read along with us, we have the PDFs for this Three Page Challenge are attached to the show notes at johnaugust.com. So, go to johnaugust.com and click on this episode and you’ll see the PDFs for these things so you can read along with us.

So, Craig, which of these Three Page Challenges should we look at first?

**Craig:** Well, the first on my pile, because I like to print these out, is —

**John:** Oh that’s right, old school.

**Craig:** Old school. It’s the signal by Cody Pearce.

**John:** Let’s go for it. Do you want to do it or should I do the summary?

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it.

**John:** Summarize!

**Craig:** Okay. So, opens with a pair of gloved hands. One of them is holding on to a leather satchel. The other is grabbing a large knife and hiding it within the folds of an animal skin coat.

We see the hermit, this is our hero that we’re following, moving out of a rustic cabin in the pines and then wearing a pair of earplugs. They put the earplugs in the ears. We don’t see a face.

The hermit moves through the woods, moving past some hidden bear traps. And then eventually arrives in a town, a small town called Pine Brush. And it looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, kind of post-apocalyptic.

As the hermit walks down a street we see a family coming. They avoid the hermit. Interesting. And then the hermit enters a general store which is run by Bob. Just this average guy. And he offers to help the hermit with something. And then the phone rings and a high pitched noise comes out of the phone and Bob suddenly stops being Bob and becomes controlled by something. He’s channeling some other voice and he attacks the hermit who is now revealed to be Michelle, a 30-year-old woman.

And the voice says, “Oh, Michelle,” through Bob says, “oh Michelle, you look terrible.” They have a fight. Bob is trying to pull out her earplugs and saying please let me help you. And eventually the fight ends when Michelle rams the knife in between Bob’s ribs. And that is our three pages from Cody Pearce. John, take it away.

**John:** So, I was intrigued by this overall. I was excited to read pages four through ten at least and see what this whole situation was going to be. Clearly The Signal is this thing that can take over people and the hermit, this character Michelle, has good reason to be isolating herself in the woods to do something.

I liked a lot of this. I was a little ahead of Cody. For whatever reason I tipped that the hermit is probably a woman dressed up under all this other stuff. But on the whole I dug it.

It was interesting to hear your summary where you say, so this is the bottom of page one. “The buildings of Pine Brush haven’t been updated in decades. Most are abandoned, businesses closed and boarded up. A few old, beaten-up cars scattered about.” Now, you read that and said post-apocalyptic. I don’t think that’s the intention. I think the intention is it’s just like a rundown town.

But, it was ambiguous, and that ambiguity hurts because those are two different universes. And I think a little bit more — I’m going to say that word — specificity could help us here. Because I need to know what kind of universe we’re in. Because I think I’m probably more right because Bob’s general store is running.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it wouldn’t be running otherwise. But it was a reasonable choice and I read it both ways the first time.

**Craig:** I agree. Many, many promising things here. I always like to say, hey, you can do this to somebody. I think, hey Cody, you can do this.

Let’s talk about what works. The style here is right for the material. There’s a lot of whitespace on the page. Very short descriptions. I’m not hearing these overdone elaborations of what the pine trees look like and how the footsteps sound in my ear, all this stuff. It’s nice and punchy and good. I was completely with you that I was ahead that something was up with the hermit. Either it was going to be a child or a woman. And the reason why is because when you write something like, “Out steps…THE HERMIT, age unknown, wearing the animal skin overcoat, his face hidden beneath a large hood.” And then, again, “We do not see his face.”

Well, then it’s not a him. You’re kind of cheating on your misdirect. If it’s a big deal that this is a woman and that we can’t see her face and that we’re supposed to be misled, I would just underplay it here in your description. Finally we see this person’s face. And not make a big deal of holy gosh it’s a lady.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At first I was a little surprised by “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” because that seemed so corny. You know, nobody really talks like that anymore. But then I thought, okay, once the little squeal-y sound happens, maybe that’s sort of Bob, that’s all that’s left of Bob’s personality. I don’t know.

**John:** See, I took this as Bob really was Bob from the start. And that was genuinely him. And then that Signal took over and he became a different person. So, I would want to take this as, and I don’t know Cody’s intention, but everything actually is fine and normal until The Signal takes over.

So, The Signal is specifically looking for her.

**Craig:** I see. Well, in that case “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” is —

**John:** Howdy is a dangerous word.

**Craig:** Just bad dialogue. The action I thought was very well written. I understood what was going on. Personally, so okay, Cody has an issue here. There is a cinematic concept whereby characters that we see onscreen are occasionally going to be possessed by some unseen intelligence that will speak through those characters.

And what Cody says, what he writes for us is in brackets: “[NOTE: from here on out, whenever a character is under the control of the Signal his dialogue will be show ” — instead of shown, that’s a typo — “(tapped)]” And then in parenthesis tapped. And so as a parenthetical every time Bob speaks with the Signal voice it says, “(tapped) Oh Michele, You look terrible.” Again, another typo Y is capitalized. And then again, “(tapped) Please…Let me help you.”

I’m not sure that’s going to work here. We’ve got, I assume, at least 90 pages of this. A lot of people are going to be talking this way. Tapped is a very strange word for this. I understand that it may make sense later, but to see it over and over and over. Plus, you’re stealing your ability as a screenwriter to put a different parenthetical in if you need to. What if the Signal voice is sarcastic or angry? Or whispering? How are you supposed to do that?

So, my argument would be that instead maybe everything that is a Signal should be in italics.

**John:** That’s exactly my suggestion.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would just make more —

**John:** Yeah, I think it makes more sense. So, keep the same note, just say that when under the control of the Signal, everything will be in italics. We’ll get it. It’ll be fine. And I agree with you. Tapped, I think, is a weird choice of that word anyway because tapped implies a physical reaction, like something is actually physically happening and that’s not what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right. My last comment for Cody is this. As screenwriters, sometimes we get trapped by convention. One of the conventions of screenplays is that when we meet characters for the first time we present their name in capital letters, we give you the age, and then we give you some brief description. Devastatingly handsome. Plan girl next door with a light in her eyes.

Well, that’s what he’s done here. “MICHELLE, 30, cute but very tired. Bangs cover her forehead.” Here’s the problem: when we see her it’s because Bob, under the influence of the evil Signal, has ripped her hood off revealing her face. That’s the last point in a movie where you want your character to be described as tired. [laughs]

**John:** Well, it’s also the last point when you want to have her described as cute.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** Cute is not very helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, find some words that will tell us, might give us a sense of her size, but also her tenacity, whatever. Give us a little bit that’s going to cue us into the action sequence that’s about to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, and plus, it’s perfectly fine to say Michelle, 30 frightened, you know, blurry-eyed, scared, whatever. Something that’s appropriate for the moment. Unless her forehead is marked with some fascinating information, I definitely don’t need to know about her bangs at this point.

And even if it is a tattoo on her forehead of something brilliant, I still don’t need to know about the bangs right now.

**John:** Exactly. You can save some of these character descriptions till a moment after this bite has happened. And make it a story point. There’s a reason why she brushes back her bangs to reveal that thing if that’s an important story — because if something about her forehead is important, put a light on it. And you can do that after this.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, she’s still going to have bangs in both places, even if you don’t say it.

**Craig:** Yup. But all around, I would say very good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So, a couple things on the page that I want to talk about. Page one, middle of the page, “The hermit moves swift and silent through the dense forest.” So, classically that’s swiftly and silently because it’s an adverb, but this swift and silent works for this. Grammatically those should be adverbs, but we tend to sort of use swift and silent. I was fine with it. But I wanted to point out that it’s the kind of thing that you can do it right or you can do what sort of works on the page. And I felt it worked on the page really well.

**Craig:** I actually prefer this incorrect method.

**John:** Yeah. And then, top of page three, first line of real action, “Michelle hits Bob’s arm, causing him to let go of her coat. She pulls out the KNIFE she had hidden in her coat.” So, awkwardness here. Causing him to let go of her coat. That is really weak. Michelle hit’s Bob’s arm, breaking free of his grasp. Causing him to let go of her coat is just really weak and passive and it’s not indicative of sort of the action that you’re describing.

**Craig:** Right. He pulls away in pain. Something other than a very clinical description.

**John:** Exactly. And both sentences are ending with her coat which is just not ideal

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t want to do that.

**John:** So, always look for repetitions between two sentences and there’s going to be reasons while you’ll want those repetitions, but most of the times you don’t want those repetitions. And this is a case where that was getting in his way.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next, John?

**John:** Next let’s do Eric Webb’s script and I will attempt to summarize this. Immortal Coil.

We’re starting in Seattle, Washington, sunset. Winter scenes of the scene transition into night, intercut with the sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. We’re seeing sort of details of the city, Pike Place market, college students, the sun dips, we hear a jingle, jingle, jingle off-screen. In the central district of town, we’re at dusk, there’s a pockmarked street with shabby apartment buildings.

Inside the bedroom of one of these apartments a form is shifting under heavy covers. The only other light in the room is a temperature controller for an electric blanket. So, there’s somebody in here asleep. Moments later, the person gets out of the bed, opens the drapes.

We’re going to meet Kaleb and Kaleb is covered in blood. Let’s see what the actual description is. “He is half undressed, his crumpled clothes twisted at awkward angles around his frame from having been slept in. He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

He’s going to be taking a shower in the bathroom and we notice after the shower there’s a faint glimmer of reflectivity can be seen in the pupils of his eyes.

More details of his apartment. Getting dressed. He tells himself you forgot something. He puts on a charming smile and drops the smile and say a word that we’re not going to say on this podcast because it’s PG-13. And then he goes out into the street. It’s night. And as he’s walking through the snow he seems to be enjoying and sort of soaking up the energy of the people around him.

He seems like he’s potentially a dangerous person. And that is the bottom of our three pages.

**Craig:** So, I can’t say that I was in love with these. Most of the issues have to do with the content as opposed to the style, but there are some style issues as well that we need to discuss. So, I guess I’ll start in with those.

We’ve got the first half of page one, for all intents and purposes reads like the introduction to a Christmas movie. We’ve got a sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. Businesses in Pike Place Market being shuttered. College students building snowmen.

And then a cell phone alarm that says Jingle Jangle Jingle, which in my mind means Christmas. [laughs] It’s just Jingle Bells. Jingle Jangle Jingle. I just think like, oh, we’re on our way to a Christmas party or something. And now we’re into this — then he reestablishes, he goes from sunset to dusk which is — I know that DPs know the difference, but the average reader doesn’t.

And actually we went from sunset to dusk to dusk. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

Obviously the sun setting is the important part because we’re dealing with a vampire. And I know this because Jingle Jangle Jingle, which I know realize, okay, yeah, for sure, this is not a Christmas movie anymore, there’s a guy who’s hiding from the sun under this bed.

Now, at the bottom of page one we have a five line action block which in my mind becomes mush.

**John:** It’s five lines, but actually almost nothing happens.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I think that’s really the tragedy of the five lines. It’s not describing this amazing moment from a war. It’s basically like there’s somebody under the blanket for five lines.

**Craig:** Right. He’s under the blanket and he’s turning his alarm off, which we’ve seen a billion times. So, now he wakes up and, I’m just going to read this because it just doesn’t work. “From behind, we see the occupant of the bed throw open a set of black-out drapes revealing make out a man’s silhouette against the battered blinds that cover the windows.”

Guys, this needs to be like sewn onto a pillow as what to not do. Obviously there’s a mistake in there, but it’s a run-on sentence. You’re missing commas. We see the occupant of the — you never want to say something like we see the occupant of the bed throw open, because people just see bed throw. The words don’t go together. It just — what’s wrong with just saying the man throws open the set of drapes. We see a silhouette.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s just so over-written. And now he’s parting the flaps of the blinds close on his eye. You want to capitalize CLOSE for me, otherwise people are going to read it as close on his eye. As he peers out at the last embers of daylight in the west. This is just — you and I talk about purple. This is purple.

Okay. But the point being at this point I’m for sure I know we’re dealing with a vampire. And I’m already a little annoyed because his name is Kaleb with a K. And this is starting to just feel very YA and very well-trodden ground. He is described as “in his early twenties with pale skin, a slender build, and long jet-black hair.” AKA, every YA vampire ever.

And, this is really where — ugh — I started to get a little squirmy. “He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

First of all, don’t tell me no wounds are apparent. He has just woken up. If he’s covered in blood, he’s okay. It’s not his blood. He’s been sleeping all night. He’s not screaming. It’s not dripping. He looks at himself in a mirror and we see “there are channels cut into the crusted mask of blood that covers part of his face, carved by tears when the blood was fresh. New tears now trace those same paths.”

Forgive me, but at this point I’m starting to feel like I should be laughing. Because that’s so over-the-top, I’m not sure what to do. And then he takes a shower and we are told, all capital letters, “THE BLOOD WAS NOT HIS.” We know. We know. We get it. This is making so much more of something that frankly we’ve seen.

**John:** My biggest challenge overall with these pages is it is totally valid here is a vampire in Seattle, great. But this introduction — benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s not a vampire movie. There’s some special details about this that it’s a different kind of supernatural thing we’re going to go into, so it’s taking the vampire tropes and it’s going to push against them. But from these three pages it feels like a vampire wakes up. And that’s sort of all we got. A vampire wakes up and takes a shower.

And I wasn’t seeing special things that let me know what kind of movie I’m in. Well, I sort of knew what kind of movie I was in, and I was not excited to be in that movie because I’ve seen this movie before.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It felt like too familiar of a setup and everything to begin with. And the writing felt like book writing rather than screenwriting. It felt like the kind of sentences that are trying to very painterly, you kind of over-describe everything because you’re trying to paint these whole scenes that you don’t really need to do in screenwriting because screenwriting is about this happens, and this happens, and this happens. It was too much at all times.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to remember that we, Eric, we control time as screenwriters. We can present things in a remarkably compressed manner, or we can drag them out so that they are painfully slow. And there are times when you want to do one or the other. And there are times when you want to just move at a general neutral speed.

What you’ve done here is you’ve dragged time out to the point now where you’re describing the color of the wallpaper and the color of the carpet and how the carpet smells, none of which is relevant here whatsoever.

The only information that I get from this is that there’s a vampire in Seattle and it makes him sad that he has to kill people to eat stuff. And that’s fine. It’s not new. And I’m certainly not — look, if it were me, god, I would much rather prefer this thing open in a bar and a woman is there and this guy comes along and starts talking to her and they’re actually getting along great. And he really likes her. And we can tell he really likes her. And then he kills her. And then he cries.

I mean, just get me into this somehow other than vampire wakes up looking just like a vampire doing vampire stuff like hiding from the sun. And then he’s got vampire blood on him. And, bummer.

**John:** Well, honestly, it’s the two kind of tropes that happen so often in these movies which is sort of like here’s the vampire and he’s being a vampire. And here’s a character waking up, here’s a character’s alarm clock going off the first thing in the morning and that’s how the movie starts. And so it’s weird that you’re sort of doing both things at once, but not weird in a fantastic way.

And Seattle is an interesting place to set, and maybe this can be some kind of artisanal vampire thing happening. That there can be something very specific about it that could be great. But Twilight is also set in the Seattle area, so that’s not even…

So, the only thing I want to say that I think is really useful for talking about craft is on page two, we’re in the bathroom, and there’s these stacked scenes where it’s like moments later, angle behind mirror, this type of thing. And it’s an example of making things much more difficult than they need to be.

And in real scripts that shoot, you’re going to find this stuff is simplified greatly. Each of these little moments, you could slug them individually, but you could also just sort of just talk through them in paragraphs. Because if it’s just a time cut within one little space and it’s just a montage of things that happen, you can call that a scene and everyone will figure out what’s supposed to happen in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the good news is clearly you guys, you, Eric, sorry, saw this scene in your head. You saw all of it. You did what you’re supposed to do. You imagined every detail of the moment, down to the colors and smells and angles. But you can’t actually then just go and dictate all of that out. You have to decide where and what to let other people in on. It’s important for you to know everything. It’s not as important for the reader to know everything.

**John:** Much more important than sort of this geography stuff, and so the color of the walls is what it feel like. And I didn’t get a great sense of what it actually felt like and what this is supposed to feel like to a person. So, like, does this apartment feel like an old grandmother’s apartment that someone inherited? Does it feel like the most seedy rock club you’ve ever been in? What does it feel like? Just give me that one line of description. Would have done a lot more good for telling the story than all the stuff that I got there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tweaker pad. Flop house. Unfurnished corporate apartment. There’s so many ways to just get this out there and I get it. By the way, hipster vampire is not a bad idea. Like if you just did a movie about just like bearded flannel-wearing, mutton chop, handle bar mustache vampires who sort of quibble over like who they drink blood from. Like are they on antibiotics. Like I don’t drink blood from anybody that’s been vaccinated. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. The anti-vaccination vampire.

**Craig:** The anti-vaccination vampire is awesome.

**John:** The last thing I want to point out, so this script is called Immortal Coil, and it’s written by Eric Webb, story by Eric Webb with Casey Ligon. And the “with” is just a really weird thing. And it’s not an actual thing that exists in the world. And would be what that would look like.

**Craig:** And.

**John:** With doesn’t exist as a credit in film land.

**Craig:** All right. Our last three pages is called Nexus and it’s written by Carlos Aldana. And I put the hard stop there because I really want to say Carlo Saldana. Carlos Saldanha is the director of the Rio movies. But this is Carlos Aldana. And it’s called Nexus.

I shall summarize thusly. SUPER: “November, 2014” We’re in darkness and then the sound of metal screeching. A big door opens up revealing Lucy. She’s 35 years old. And she’s telling some people to hurry and four people running after her, just silhouetted. She guides the group up an emergency stairwell in a building. They all carry guns. They’re all dirty and tired.

Ryan, who is 39, Ashley, 17, Earl, 44, and Eddie Jeong, 23. And they’re asking how much longer. And Earl is saying you better haul ass if you don’t want to get caught by one of those things.

**John:** We’ll come back to that line.

**Craig:** We’re going to come back to a lot of these lines. So, then we get in to the office. Something is growling. And it turns out, oh, it’s not a monster. It’s just a dog. This is an abandoned office. Lucy opens up a safe. Rather, she tells Jeong to open up a safe. And Ashley says mom. So, that turns out to be Lucy’s daughter, Ashley. And she’s looking at the Los Angeles skyline, except the buildings are destroyed and abandoned. I think I’m now safe to say this is post-apocalyptic.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s fair. I think there’s been a recession. There are issues. But I think we’re now safely post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** Right. So, Lucy is reminiscing about a Los Angeles that once was. And Jeong opens up a safe.

Now, here’s what’s in the safe. A disk the size of a quarter, a key card, and six high tech pucks called either DITs or D-I-Ts. It’s hard to tell. And they are futuristic objects that stick together and also do not stick together and also stick to concrete. And she throws them at a wall. There are some geography issues. The point being that they create a portal. That these things open a portal up. And the portal appears to reveal another place that’s just like the place they’re in. It’s like a mirror, but a mirror into another place.

You know, if I’m running out of juice on the summary, you know there’s some trouble. [laughs] I’m not really sure what happened. That’s the god’s honest truth, John. I’m not exactly sure what happened.

**John:** So, I thought the idea of you throw this thing at the wall and it opens up and forms a portal, yeah, I’ve played the game Portal. I like the game Portal. So, maybe there’s something really great to do there. So, I wasn’t nuts about the description of it, but I was intrigued enough to say like, well, what kind of movie is this.

The thing that obviously intrigues me right from the start is it says November 2014. And it’s like, well, that’s now. That’s actually today. But it’s a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. So, something has changed. Either the timeline has changed, or Carlos actually wrote this a couple of years ago and made some bad predictions.

**Craig:** Well, but on his front page he writes May, 2014. And also copyright 2014, which by the way, Carlos, not necessary to write.

**John:** Not necessary. Also not necessary to have the comma after May, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, something has happened. I think it’s a deliberate choice to say this is an alternate timeline. There’s something else going on. And given that we’re able to bend the laws of physics in order to create these portals, maybe the time has moved, too.

Unfortunately, while it’s generally great to start in the middle of action, that’s usually a really good thing to try to do, I don’t think it’s helping us so much here because I don’t know who these characters are in a useful way. And I’m not particularly intrigued, just based on the little bits of dialogue that I’m getting.

And so, “How much longer? Almost there.” Okay. Fine. “You better haul ass if you don’t wanna get caught by one of those things.” I don’t know what this world is, but these people seem to know what they’re doing, and no one would say that if they’d been through this before.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why would you say that about the most important and dangerous thing. Like if you were working in the Ebola zone, and you saw somebody, like one of your fellow doctors without a surgical mask on, would you say, “You better put your surgical mask on, or you’ll catch Ebola.” That’s the equivalent. I mean, it’s just crazy.

**John:** It is truly the equivalent. And so that felt weird and it just took me out of the movie because it so made it clear we’re in a movie.

**Craig:** Well, if that didn’t make it clear that you’re in a movie, how about these descriptions. And talk about these descriptions for me, please, these character descriptions.

**John:** Okay. Let’s read through them. So, Lucy is 35, petite and brunette. That’s all we get.

**Craig:** Petite and brunette. I think you’ve got to just stop there. We cannot — I get that we have lived in a world where men have reduced women in movies frequently to the girl. We can’t do this anymore. You cannot define a human being by their physical height and then their hair color.

**John:** Well, to be fair, Lucy is 35, petite, and brunette, while Ashley is 17, petite but tough.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay. She’s tough. Okay. Fair enough. She’s also petite, though.

**John:** So, women in this movie so far we’ve learned can be brunette and they can be tough.

**Craig:** You certainly can’t be both.

**John:** And it’s possible they can be both. So, what we’re really saying is that Lucy is the first person we’re introduced to. We need some description of her that tells us what she’s like, not what she looks like.

**Craig:** Correct. Unless Lucy dies on page four as a big shocker and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, we need more from Lucy, because right now she feels like the hero. And it it’s true that Lucy dies suddenly and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, then we need more about Ashley. Either way, nobody — the script has given us no information about who we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

**John:** So, two things about this. First off, is the misdirect is that Lucy’s going to die on page four, the misdirect has to happen on the page, too. So, give us a little bit of stuff about her so we have sense of who she is, because then it’s actually going to be rewarding for us that she got killed off. So, give us a description that sort of lands for us and anchors us.

But, the bigger issue here I think, in addition to the specific choices of the words we’re using to describe these characters is you’re shooting us, all four of them at once. There’s that shotgun approach. Here’s four characters and they’re running and doing things. That’s really hard to be great in any circumstance, because we don’t know what we’re supposed to pay attention to. And we’re desperately looking for things, but you have them running and doing all this other stuff. It makes it just very hard for us to relate to any one of your characters because you’re giving us four all at once.

**Craig:** I mean, this is what you’re suggesting. Screenplays are proposing to an unseen, unknown director, what to shoot. What you are proposing here that the director shoots is Lucy guiding people up stairs. And as they walk our camera just sees each one of them. And none of them say anything until the last one. So, we’re just literally watching this lineup of four people.

This is ultimately what we know. Lucy is petite and brunette. Ryan moves and carries his gun like a pro. Definitely military or police. Ah, okay. We won’t know that in any way, shape, or form. Ashley, petite, but tough, looks a bit old for her age. We won’t know her age, so none of that matters. And then, Earl, 44, big muscular black guy in mechanic overalls. Lastly, Eddie Jeong, pale and skinny Asian, clearly tired going up the stairs.

Not only does this read like the kind of group you see in B-level zombie videogames, but it’s a bad version. It’s kind of racist. It feels like — like what race is Ryan? What race is Lucy? What race is Ashley?

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Craig:** I guess they’re white, because you don’t mention it.

**John:** The default is white.

**Craig:** The default is white and that’s just not cool. Like, especially if you’re going to end in big black guy and skinny Asian dude land. Eh…

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about, let’s say that you needed to introduce these characters in the stairwell. A way you might want to do that is if Lucy’s in front, we meet Lucy, and she’s like, “Hold up.” And she’s looking for something. We’re on her for a moment and she’s talking to unseen people. And then she finally gives the go ahead for them to follow her up. And so then we have a moment with her. Okay. Here’s a spotlight on her. And then she’s going to move up. And then we can meet one or maybe two more people and see what their dynamic is. And then we’re finally going to meet those last two people.

But right now getting all of these people on screen at once, it helps nobody.

**Craig:** It’s impossible to do well. The truth is you kind of need somebody to say something before you give a damn about who they are. Or, they have to do something before you give a damn about who they are.

So, if it were me, I would probably have Lucy and Ashley together, talking quietly with each other. Nobody else. And then when they make sure the coast is clear, they open up another — like they’ve wriggled through a window and now they open up a door and there’s a guy saying, “What took you so long?” Some terrible movie line, but the point being, okay, and now we can see who that is.

**John:** Or, they split up in two groups. So, two of them are searching one place and two of them are searching another place. And then they’re going to cross paths again and they’re looking for something. Obviously they are looking for something, so separate them and then bring them together. And establish stakes that way. So, we don’t even know what the relationship is between these people. Are they on the same side or opposite sides? Just create some tension there by not giving us all these team together at once.

**Craig:** And you know you have a problem when already on the top of page two, just page two, you’ve now shorthanded the most important human beings in your movie to “our group.” That’s bad. That’s a bad sign.

**John:** So, I want to talk a little bit about some of the word choices on page one. “A gap opens and light shines at the camera.” Okay. So, we’re talking about the camera, but did we need to? A gap opened. A light shines through. Ah, I got rid of the camera. “The door finally gives in, the light floods in and we see the silhouette of LUCY.” I’m not opposed to we sees, but there’s a lot of we sees here. And we don’t need this we see. The door finally gives in, light floods in. The silhouette of Lucy. Better description for Lucy.

“They rush up a set of emergency stairs in an unnamed building.” [laughs] In an unnamed building? It’s unnamed because you haven’t given it a name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can’t say that you’re not telling us something because you’re not telling us something. Rush up a flight of stairs in an office building. In a something building. Give us something.

Next paragraph. “We can barely see them in the dark. But we can tell they’re tired and dirty.”

**Craig:** What? What? How?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How? If we can barely see them, how are we supposed to tell they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And dirty.

**John:** But we don’t need those two we cans. There’s ways to write around that so you can save those we’s for when they’re actually really important.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s my stumping for — I hate the script rule say you can never talk about the camera and you can never say “we see” or “we hear.” You can do all those things, but you have to be really judicious about when you’re going to pull out those tools, because sometimes there’s no better way to do it. So, you use those things. But in all these cases there were ways to just describe things and not have to say we-s.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, in general, if I’m going to use we see, it’s because we are seeing something shocking, or I want the screenplay to let the reader know that we in the audience are seeing something that the character on screen is not.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But you’re right, this is just sort of peppered in there. If the other stuff were working I wouldn’t mind that stuff so much. The building that has no name is described later as, again, as a generic office building. And, again, sunlight floods and blinds — we’ve got a sunlight flooding in at people. Not sure why. It’s kind of unmotivated sunlight.

The bigger issue is what the heck is going on on page three. I mean, let’s just jump ahead. [laughs] Because, you know, first of all, let’s talk about this description. You’re introducing new technology to us. We’re in a zombie movie, presumably, or something like a zombie movie. But, also, you have a twist which is portals. Okay. Fine.

So, what comes out of the safe is some mysterious disk which we’re not going to address at this point, a key card which is a key card and we won’t have to deal with it at this point, and “six high tech pucks called DITs.” What the hell am I supposed to think from that? Like, all right, I’m the prop guy. What’s a high tech puck? What is that? You’ve got to give me more.

**John:** Because I don’t know. I saw pucks and I didn’t think about the high tech of it all. I bet they’re glowing LED pucks.

**Craig:** Are they? Are they?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Are they glowing? Do they have buttons? They have grooves? Are they metallic? Are they intricate? I mean, these things are central to the movie. You’ve got to describe.

**John:** Yeah. Do they look like human technology or some sort of alien artifact thing? Yeah. I agree with you there, Craig. And it’s obviously going to be central to our story, so it’s worth a little bit of time right here to do. This just wasn’t the best way to do it.

The only other thing I was to point out on, halfway through page three. “The 4 pieces spread until the light rectangle is about the size of a door.” He used the number four rather than the spelled out four. Just follow general kind of AP rules. Numbers that are less than ten, spell out. Numbers that are in dialogue, kind of always spell out. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get people to pronounce things properly, the way you expect them to be pronounced. But there was no reason to use the numeral here. It slows you down.

**Craig:** Yeah. No reason at all. Take some time to make us love the DIT. I think you’ve got to — help me out here. Is it a DIT or is it a D-I-T? Also, don’t tell me what it’s called if these people aren’t going to say anything. If someone is going to talk about it later, that’s when I find out what it’s called. I don’t need this information now because it’s not being used by me or the people in the scene, the name of it. See?

**John:** Yeah. And it would be a simple thing that I would actually buy if the character opens the safe and is like, “Got ’em. Six DITs.” And it’s like I see there are six things. They must be called DITs. I know what to call those things now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, it’s very doable. This is always a fun process because people send in these pages and they are being incredibly brave to show the work that they’ve done and let us talk about. In the case of two of these scripts, we dug in and we didn’t like sort of what we were seeing on the page, but it’s still incredibly useful I hope for other writers to look at their own work and see, oh, these are the kinds of things I’m doing that work or don’t work. And maybe I can make some different choices.

**Craig:** That’s right. And for those of you today, the two of you who kind of got a little bit of a beating, and even our other guy who got a little bit of a beating, just take comfort in this: these are the beatings that we give each other. And these are the beatings we get ourselves.

Lindsay Doran and I spent, I don’t know, an hour the other day talking about two paragraphs, two small paragraph descriptions. And if it were clear, or how to make it clear where somebody was standing. This is the kind of OCD level of detail that you need. And you need to love it. And this is part of the game.

**John:** Well, it’s that crucial ability to see this is what my intention was and this is how it’s coming out on the other side. So, for these people who sent in these pages, they clearly had an intention. There was a reason they wrote these pages. And they didn’t land with us the way I think they thought they would land. And so that is hopefully a valuable experience. So, that’s why we do Three Page Challenges. That’s why we did it in Austin and why we’re doing this one.

But I need to thank these writers for sending them in and all the writers who send in Three Page Challenges. We have like a 250 script backlog of these samples. And, honestly, Stuart picks the ones that are pretty good. So, that’s a sign that people are, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re struggling out there.

**John:** They’re struggling and they’re also making choices that can hopefully be improved by just having someone take a look at them and really look at them critically.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you are playing the home game, take a look at your first three pages and ask yourself how would this go with John and Craig? [laughs] You know? Because, honestly, we are not particularly hard on this stuff. I really do believe that. I know it feels that way, but this is the name of the game out here. It’s the way it goes.

**John:** So, if you have three pages of your own script that you want to send in to have us take a look at, the proper URL to send them to is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And there’s a form you fill out and you check some boxes and you attach your file and you send them through.

We still call it the Three Page Challenge, it’s really meant to be like the first sequence of a movie. But three pages ends up being about the mountain we can actually talk about usefully in a show. So, for now we’ll stick with Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got a big long show, so I’ll be quick about my One Cool Thing this week. Yosemite, the new operating system for Macintosh, has an excellent new feature that works in concert with their new version of iOS and it’s called Family Sharing. And I find this incredibly useful because I used to give my kids an allowance of, I think I gave them $10 a month to spend on apps. And then they would do that, but I didn’t really know exactly what they were getting.

And then, inevitably, if they wanted something that was more expensive or two things, and they were worth it, they’d have to come to be, and it was annoying. So, Family Sharing is great because now every time they want to buy anything, if it’s an app, or a song, or anything, they request it. And the request comes to me on both my MacBook and also on my phone and on my iPad and on Melissa’s phone, and on her iPad, and her computer.

So, either one of us can hit approve or deny. And therefore we’re in charge of all of it which I find very satisfying.

**John:** That is a really good thing. Mine is also short. It’s this collection of Aesop’s Fables that have been rendered as web pages using Google Fonts collection. So, Google Font’s, like Typekit, has all these amazing typefaces. And so these designers took the Google Fonts and told the stories using these amazing typefaces. And it’s a great example of sort of how expressive type can be on the internet now. And this is all real type. This is isn’t just picture graphics. This is actually — you can select every word there and it’s just done programmatically with fonts. It looks great.

And so it’s a good inspiration for anybody who is designing something on the web in 2014/2015, to really look at the expressive power of typefaces.

**Craig:** Mm, good show.

**John:** Good show. Good long show.

**Craig:** Good to be back. Feels good to be back.

**John:** Back at my place.

**Craig:** You know, I can smell all these people, John. They’re aiming for my job. They’re gunning for me. I know Birbiglia wants this gig.

**John:** Oh, he absolutely wants this gig. And Susannah Grant was great. She put in a great audition.

**Craig:** Yeah, Susannah, actually, I think would be better than I am.

**John:** Susannah is pretty great.

**Craig:** She’s awesome. But Birbiglia. Huh.

**John:** He’s got that comedian thing. It’s dangerous.

**Craig:** It’s Steal-giglia.

**John:** Yeah. I confessed to Mike that I actually wrote him in as a part in this one thing I’m hoping to do. And so I’ll get to work with him regularly if that were to happen.

**Craig:** That’s very clever.

**John:** See? You should do that, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I’m not going to do it. He deserves nothing. [laughs] Nothing.

**John:** He deserves nothing. He’s a job poacher.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** As always, you can find some links to things we talked about in today’s show at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you go to scriptnotes.net, that’s where you can subscribe to all the back episodes and all the bonus episodes. We’ll have two bonus episodes coming up really soon. We have an interview I did with Simon Kinberg for the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And we’ll have the Three Page Challenge we did at Austin. So, both of those will be going up as bonus episodes, so if you want to listen to those. We are so super close to having a thousand subscribers at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** For the premium feed. And, Craig, off recording I will tell you the best inspiration I had for a guest for the dirty show. So, people, sign up.

If you want to subscribe to our normal feed, that’s in iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. It’s because people left so many great comments that iTunes featured us as one of the best podcasts, which was just so nice of them to do.

I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can send to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are interested in Writer Emergency, those decks of cards we are starting to do in Kickstarter, go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to our Kickstarter campaign for that.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** Stuart Friedel produced the podcast. Matthew Chilelli edited it. Thank you, Matthew. And he has a Kickstarter campaign, too. So, there will be a link up in the show notes for Matthew’s Kickstarter campaign for —

**Craig:** Ugh, god.

**John:** A movie he’s doing. Craig, you’re going to be the last person with a Kickstarter campaign.

**Craig:** Uh, yeah.

**John:** You are going to start a Kickstarter campaign to shut down Kickstarter.

**Craig:** [laughs] I might. I just might.

**John:** Yeah, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** That’s dividing by zero.

**John:** [laughs] Good stuff. Thank you. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye.

Links:

* [Writer Emergency](http://writeremergency.com) is live [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [Marvel announces its superhero slate](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Marvel-Just-Announced-All-Movies-With-Release-Dates-Title-Art-67919.html)
* StartUp, Episode 1: [How Not to Pitch a Billionaire](http://hearstartup.com/episodes/1-how-not-to-pitch-a-billionaire)
* Three Pages by [Cody Pearce](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CodyPearce.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Eric Webb](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/EricWebb.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Carlos Aldana](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CarlosAldana.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Family Sharing](https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/family-sharing/) on iOS 8
* [Aesop’s Fables in Google Fonts](http://femmebot.github.io/google-type/)
* Support Matthew’s film [Escape the Dark](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1379703609/escape-the-dark-a-horror-feature) on Kickstarter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))